Lots of issues here.

Rap, in Idaho you are again paying *below* $2.00 a gallon? What kind of clout does your Senator have? In Juneau, Alaska, a few minutes ago, I noted that our prices range from $2.62 to $2.81. Far cry from below $2.00 but better than the $3.10 we'd had before.

Lanfranc, not all Americans have a "selfish love" of or even own an SUV or gas guzzling behemoth of any kind. I, for one, sold my car (which got 36 to 42 mpg) 17 years ago and I get around on foot, on the bus, by cab or by friends. I am not alone. My smallish (30000) town supports 3 cab companies, which tells me that many people here do not own their own cars. Blanket assertions have a lot of holes in them and tend to wear thin.

I don't hold a brief for SUVs in urban areas but Yukies often do not have a clue as to what our situation is. Our land mass, compared with yours, is huge. If you wanted to drive to Ireland (OK, take the ferry) and Scotland and Wales and planned to spend two days in each country before your return to central London, how much time would it take? Two weeks? 10 days? Forget about our plans to visit Mexico and Canada by car and then return to downtown Topeka, Kansas (pretty central US)- (that's formidable) instead, think of driving just from Topeka to Maine or to Washington DC orto Seattle or to Los Angeles... If you left Topeka and wanted to spend two days at Kendall and Jacqui's house in Maine before you returned home, you would have been gone about 10 days right there. If you left Topeka and headed for Juneau, Alaska you have a couple of options: drive the Alcan through Canada and then at a certain intersection head south. After about 500 miles you come to a seaport where you will put your vehicle on the ferry and travel on the water for 6 hours before you finally arrive in Juneau. You will have travelled about 2,000 miles. Or you can drive to Seattle/Bellingham, Washington state, put your car on the ferry and three days later arrive in Juneau. From Kansas to Juneau going that route you will have travelled about 3,000 miles. Mind you, these are not kilometres.

My point is that travel in the US is not a small matter of driving 50 or 100 miles. If that is the distance you need to go, an itty bitty car will do. If you're driving 3000 miles an SUV or a camper van or something large than a teacup is a heck of a lot more comfortable.   

In tightly populated regions there are more trains (In Juneau we have zero train track) but they tend not to go into the hinterlands. And given our land mass, an awful lot of our driving is into and through the hinterlands.