I think you still completely misunderstand almost everything.

Long commutes are the result of bad city planning. Most of the long commutes are not in rural areas, but essentially from the outskirts of a city to the city center.

America decided to build huge suburbs devoid of any meaningful jobs. Suburbs are low density, so you need to build a lot of them to house the people, but that also means a lot of space is taken up by hardly any people. So the distance between your house and your job is simply longer.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the size of the country. You don't plan a city on a national scale. That happens locally.

This entire thread is another example of the "murica never bad, murica special" trope. North America isn't magically a completely different place from everywhere else.