Apart from a handful of cities that were utterly destroyed not much of Europe got rebuilt from scratch after WWII. There are parts of water systems from <i>Roman</i> times still in use today, and town centres whose housing stock largely dates back to before the Declaration of Independence.<p>150 years ago the US had only 23 million inhabitants, most of whom lived in rural areas that didn&#x27;t have much infrastructure. The government might trace a continuous line back to then, but very little of the infrastructure or housing stock does. US infrastructure might be old compared with Singapore&#x27;s but it&#x27;s young by Western standards.