Yeah, maybe I'm overly pedantic, but the author is also overly pedantic about the curvatures of streets/roads in games, so... :)

But, to continue with the pedantry: the Romans already built cities far from (navigable) water. There have been roads since antiquity, then since the mid 19th century it was first the railways that made it easy to transport passengers and goods over large distances. The current version of roads being the main/only form of transportation only came about in the 1950s.