The underground in Glasgow was comprised of orange trains. They “ran like clockwork” and had the nickname “the clockwork orange”, which is where the Stanley Kubrick movie title came from. Allegedly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(novel)#Tit...
Never thought I'd get to know what Clockwork Orange actually means through a random comment on HN.
Before WW2 there wasn't much infrastructure to begin with, the big highways have been built after.
The metro lines from before are still there and the bridges that were built before the war have just been rebuilt in the same places (i.e. were the roads arrived and the river was narrow).
Most of the big cities also still have medieval and older city centers, and we're still using roman-era routes for roads.
London, Glasgow, Budapest and Paris all have metro systems that predate the New York Subway
There are multiple bridges that are still in use that predate European colonization of North America
While the oldest airport is in the US, (College Park), Hamburg, Bucharest, Bremen, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Sydney all follow very shortly after
AFAICT Skyscrapers is really the only example you give where the US canonically built the v1.0
I think that there are probably other reasons, my suspicion is primarily rent seeking