The geography's fine, it's the zoning that destroyed it. You don't need to have your entire country be oceans of parking with a few buildings sprinkled in the middle.
To be fair, that's exactly how LA turned into LA: they ripped up streetcar lines, demolished parts of the city to make room for interstate highways, and changed the development rules to require low density and lots of parking.
Which is to say, American cities were not born with the car centrism, they were demolished and rebuilt with it. The reason it succeeded here, but not in London, may have a lot to do with the insane corruption due to the auto industry here (but we call it lobbying, not corruption, so it's fine :P), and also due to the hyper racist forces that drove white flight to suburbs. Also the incredible amounts of federal money that went to the interstate highway system.
A bit like how London couldn't turn into LA now without demolishing half of it. We tried to build a couple of freeways in the 60's and failed.