It depends a lot on where you go to. The cities of the NEC (Boston-Washington axis), along with Chicago and (to a lesser degree) San Francisco are generally pretty hostile to cars and have dense and compact cores. There's a tranche of cities that are trying to develop more towards that transit-heavy/car-lite scenario, which includes Seattle and Portland (and surprisingly, Los Angeles, but they have a long way to go). Then there's the cities that embraced the automobile and have blocks of nothing but parking in their downtown--Kansas City is one of the worst offenders here. And of course the suburbs tend to lean heavily into the space-wasting, automobile-centric design.
It's quite striking just how compact things are in the first set of cities compared to the automobile-centered places elsewhere in the US. Apple's spaceship campus is about the size of downtown Providence. Or, if you impose it on Midtown Manhattan, it would cover the entire area between Penn Station, Grand Central, Broadway, and the Empire State Building (which incidentally houses more employees by itself than Apple's campus does).
It's quite striking just how compact things are in the first set of cities compared to the automobile-centered places elsewhere in the US. Apple's spaceship campus is about the size of downtown Providence. Or, if you impose it on Midtown Manhattan, it would cover the entire area between Penn Station, Grand Central, Broadway, and the Empire State Building (which incidentally houses more employees by itself than Apple's campus does).