Not generally like that in mug of Texas. Houston proper has some questionable roads — but that has been due to a series of mayors that are more interested in farmers markets and “pocket parks” than actually doing the dirty work of actually running a city. The state of Texas has great roads. Far better than anything you see in places like NY, NJ or other states with Byzantine labor agreements. I live in France now and the highways here in the south (such as the A7 are extremely good — and generally privately managed (our area is run by Da Vinci) while up near the Dijon area the roads get pretty bad by comparison (highways there are run by a different group,) while in Germany, I was generally unimpressed by the Autobahn — especially driving from Hamburg to Berlin. The southern French autoroutes are luxurious by comparison. Infrastructure in Paris is a bit decayed, especially the RER going to CDG airport, while the PATH train in the NYC area is actually really nice. Florida roads are generally really nice and historically, Louisiana roads were pretty bad — you noticed it immediately crossing from Texas — that was a result of years of the Feds denying federal funding for highways because Louisiana refused to be bullied into a 21 year old drinking age.

The Houston airport is nice — a lot of work done in the 1990s and a lot of renovation done recently funded by United Airlines. SFO is nice too. CDG in Paris is a shithole airport compared to Frankfurt and SFO and Houston. Heathrow seems pretty nice, at least Terminal 2 but they don’t compare to Seoul Incheon airport.

My point is that generalized statements about the American infrastructure aren’t generally fair since the US isn’t a monolithic organization — things vary widely due to local history. Heavily union places like NY and NJ generally have far worse infrastructure than places that aren’t so influenced by corrupt union “machine” politics. When labor bosses and the mafia have material control of infrastructure politics, you are going to have sluggish development. Another problem in New York is that’s you have seemingly dozens of agencies all stepping on each other: you have the City, the Port Authority, the states of NJ and New York, individual boroughs, multiple unions and then the Feds on top of that — and everyone in that chain has to get paid. It’s a mess.