From an european's standpoint, north america's grid type roads seem a bit boring but at the same time more relaxing and simpler, especially for city driving.
Not all of North America uses a grid pattern. At least as far as the USA is concerned, only pubic lands states which were surveyed with Public Land Survey System do. These were surveyed and laid out in 40-acre parcels. Which is where the terms "back 40" and "front 40" and "40 acres and a mule" came from.
The largest block size you'll commonly see in most of these states is 160 acres or 1/4 mile by 1/4 mile. You can go out to any rural area in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois (to name a few) and there will be crossroads every 1/4 mile. In the urban and suburban areas with this sort of grid pattern, there will typically be a major road every 1 mile.
The advantage to this system is that there are many parallel routes and so if a road is closed due to a flood, an accident, or whatever, a detour might take you a mile or two out of your way at most. And, as an area transitions from rural to suburban or urban, the blocks become smaller. A 300-home subdivision in one of the 160-acre blocks will be surrounded by four existing roads and could (and probably will) have access points on all of them.
Now let's compare that to what we have on the east coast of the USA, specifically, Virginia.
Virginia has no grid pattern, except in big cities. There are many places in Virginia where a road closure will make you take a 10 or even 20 mile detour. Many of the oldest roads in Virginia seemed to have been laid out for the sole purpose of transporting cotton and tobacco to port, and there is a dearth of roads going in some directions and linking some populated areas. A common comment about the roads in Northern Virginia is that "whomever designed these roads must have been on LSD".
I can assure you that they were designed long before LSD was invented...and were probably barely adequate when the area was tobacco and cotton fields..
The 300-home subdivision in Northern Virginia will likely have one single access point, and that may well be on a 2-lane highway. Another 300-home subdivision may be built off of that same 2-lane highway right next to the existing one and the only connection between the two will be the existing highway.
Because there's no existing grid pattern to enforce some sort of order on how development is done, developers will do whatever is cheapest for them, even if it creates a traffic problem. A common complaint from the person living in the 300-home subdivision is that they want a traffic signal because there's so much traffic on the 2-lane road, the only one their neighborhood is connected to, that they have problems making left turns.
And new roads are typically dead-end streets that serve only the neighborhood they connect to. Take a look at a map from say 1850, and you'll notice that most of the roads in Northern Virginia that actually connect to other roads and therefore could serve as a thru-route...existed in 1850. There have been some new roads that have been built to serve as thru-routes but not nearly as many as the population increase since then would warrant. And some of them are Interstates, so now you have local traffic using the Interstate as a thru-route which it really wasn't intended for, and which causes congestion on the Interstate.