It is beyond me how americans can complain about gas prices. In Sweden people pay more than twice as much, and everyone seems to be fine with it. On top of that, americans have even more money to spend than do swedes. So, are americans cheap, or just spoiled?
Neither. We're just a terribly spread-out and need lots of fuel.
Your fuel consumption has nothing to do with the size of your country. It is caused simply by a lack of (willingness to introduce) any form of requirements for providing commercial facilities alongside new residential developments, combined with the general mindset that you need a car to get anywhere that this has produced.
My Czech friend's parents marveled constantly while here about how distant everything was from everything else. "You need to drive just to get a loaf of bread?" Yep.
This is where you have a point: the combination of urban sprawl and lack of (use of) public transit means you need to do many short trips.
But that doesn't mean I agree with grandparent
I don't think Europeans understand just how large the USA relative to Europe and how less populated it is (perhaps a result of seeing Mercator projection maps that exaggerate Europe's size).
I don't think you understand that Europe is a fairly large group of sovereign nations, of wildly different geographical size and layout. Sweden has a population density of 20.6/km2, yet is larger than California (population density 93.3/km2). Certainly people commute comparable distances around Stockholm to what people do around Silicon Valley.
Consider this: the distance from San Diego, California, USA to Bangor, Maine, USA is greater than the distance from Stockholm, Sweden to Delhi, India.
And how many times per year do you usually drive from San Diego to Bangor? Yes, the US is a huge country, but that is unrelated. People in the US tend to fly instead.
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