>>Really? we are already used to high gas prices. We have adjusted out living to it. The rise of gas prices aren't doing us as much as in the US. First of all, because the US was used to very low gas prices, but now the big cars are getting dumped because driving a V6 200hp truck is getting too expensive to many american. Many of us are taking the train or bus or are getting reimbursed from our employers. We can declare 27 cents per kilometer to deduct from our income tax. Really those sky high gas prices does not hurt as much as the it does to the average america: Our society already has found its way to deal with those.
>
>You found the way by being a small percentage of the total area of the US. Makes it a lot easier to get from point A to point B, and a lot easier and cheaper to build mass transit capability between those points.

Actually, that way has always existed in Europe, even when nobody knew that some Italian lunatic will be the last guy to find a new continent: there were cities, villages, fields and forests - with clear limits. You lived outside of a village only in special cases. Suburb was a bad word, that was where the workers' sheds were.

It's something very specific to the U.S. market. Canada, Central and South America have maybe as much, or often more, space per capita, yet they don't, in most cases known to me, waste the land by extending their cities so far. The houses here are built probably the same way the vehicles are, the bigger the better; the lots they take also. Probably because the fixed cost per one is not negligible, and the extra cost for a larger one is, compared to the profit one makes. So make everything bigger - houses, cars, lots, rooms, furniture (just compare the width of the armrest on an American armchair or sofa vs Japanese or European), parking lots, parking slots, roads, waistlines, distances between houses, sizes of suburbs, sizes of McMansions, all made possible by cheap fuel.

Well, eof().