I'm sorry, but even though I'm an American (or USAian, if you prefer) and support public transportation, wish it was better and more widespread, &c.-- it's simply shortsighted and simplistic to ascribe it to zeal for private ownership of automobiles. Although enjoyment of the private auto is a distinctly American and capitalist thing, the fact is that it's drastically less expensive and challenging to leverage public transportation in Europe, which is a much smaller land mass.

That statement was very tongue in cheek. I'm from Ohio originally and love driving. I brought a car with me to college, and will be living in Northern California with a car (I actually plan to buy a new one soon). Having lived with a "convenient public transit system" in NYC for 3 months, I can safely say I far prefer driving, if only for the purely selfish and capitalistic reasons :)

You're hitting on what I was getting at though, which is that it's just not that big of a deal to the average American, because we drive. Next time I will leave being clever to the professionals :P

Be as clever as you wish and do not worry about downvotes.

I see that argument a lot but am not really convinced by it. Sure the US has a bunch of land for the population it has, but that is mostly because it has a lot of unpopulated areas in the middle. There's no reason that the actual urban areas need to be less dense and that's where most of the trips happen. There's plenty of countryside outside London or Paris to expand into, so European cities aren't denser because space is at a premium.

I think the real difference is that even in urban areas the US has a much larger tendency to build suburban, single-family housing whereas in Europe apartment buildings are much more common. People prioritize living close to the city center and having a 5 minute commute over having a house and a garden and spending 1+ hours on the highway every day. So it's much more about local density and that is a function of urban planning decisions/preferences and has nothing to do with TotalPopulation/TotalLandMass.

Cars are amongst the easiest of things to track - cameras with license plate recognition, and potentially with the capability to also photograph the driver are widely deployed, in many places in Europe; I don't know about the US. With an infra-red flash, you'll not necessarily know you were photographed.

I live in Europe and never heard of this. Care to share a link?

'Average Speed Cameras' in the UK use automatic number plate recognition technology. They 'read' your licence plate at set intervals and use that to work out how fast you're going on average, rather than at a single sample point like a traditional speed camera.

A few years back the police were agitating to get these cameras on every motorway and A road with a camera every half a mile.

The stated reason was specifically to allow tracking of vehicles after crimes had been committed, but everyone was suspicious that it was just to raise revenue by catching more people speeding and I think the scheme has been scaled back.

I don't have a link handy, bit it's been widely discussed on Bruce Schneier's blog (http://www.schneier.com/blog/) in the past, especially in the context of the UK.