But the small lots I think are a big thing. Most fast food, banks, and all sorts of other businesses in NYC and even in neighboring Nassau (Long Island) don't have big parking lots, or any parking lot at all. By having a drive-thru they are able to court customers in cars that would otherwise not realistically be able to get to the business at all because they would have no where to park.
Are there no businesses situated in town centres that people can walk to? This is what confuses me, why someone has to drive to and park at the bank. Here, we'd either drive into town and park in the car park, or get the bus into town, and 'town' is somewhere you can walk around and take care of all your business and shopping.
Ah, the joys of suburban sprawl. Where I live grew up, up the street there was a grocery store, pharmacy, one bank, a few fast food places, and a few hole in the wall stores, as well as a couple of liquor stores and a gas station.
Up another street and around a corner, about just as far away, had an actual strip mall with a few chain stores, a grocery store, a few boutiques, a pharmacy, a gas station, and one bank.
Go in a third direction from my home and at about half the distance was a grocery store, a few restaurants, a few more boutique shops, an eyeglasses shop, a tailor, a gas station, and two banks.
Each of these places is about a mile in any direction from my home. But if you didn't belong to any of those three banks, you'd have to go further to get to your bank. And the grocery stores varied wildly as quality of produce/meat and price. Plus where and when I grew up, there was no public transportation. Now there are a very few limited stops along the street where the first shopping center is, but it's nearly prohibitively expensive to ride it, it doesn't take you where you need to go, and if you need to go into the next state over (I live in a city that straddles two states), you'll have to get off of our buses and wait on one of theirs. And there's one county in my state that just doesn't connect well with anything else. I've never seen public transit there. I don't know if they have any.
The nearest hospital growing up was about two and a half miles away, but we were lucky to have a dentist within a block that I could walk to when I was old enough. Optometrists that were covered on our insurance were quite a drive away, I'm fairly certain it took us 10-15 minutes driving to get there. Same for orthodontists. And the doctor's office was at the hospital (large medical building, several practices attached to a massive hospital), but if I had to see a specialist, I had to go to another hospital more than seven miles away.
And outside the major city centers, suburban sprawl is pretty normal in the US. People rely on their cars to get them places because there's no infrastructure for public transit and nothing is close enough to get to by walking. That's the trade off for large yards and single family homes.