I drove around Munich for a week, then from there through Austria for a couple weeks and back into Bavaria.

The roads are good. The autobahns are probably better than our interstates --- though not by that much. Traffic congestion was as much a problem there as in the American midwest. Their surface streets are on average not as good as Chicago metro area surface streets (but are probably better than Baltimore's). And I feel a good deal safer on US rural highways than I did on German and Austrian rural highways, which are beautiful, well-maintained, nightmarish death traps.

I think you'd be setting yourself up for a pretty tough argument if you wanted to claim that the US doesn't do public roads well. Do we do them better than Germany? No. But we do public roads anomalously well, especially for the degree of difficulty involved in providing them across a whole continent.

I'll concede that I don't have data to back up my claim, and that anecdotally roads might be the area of infrastructure where we're least bad compared to Western Europe and Japan.