Wanted to put in my two cents for the Europeans who are telling the U.S. that we rely on cars too much.
While this seems like borderline too much info for an Internet message board, I'm going to use the actual town names specifically so that anybody interested can pull the locations up on Google Maps or Google Earth to see exactly what I'm talking about.
I live in a town in Washington called Cheney. I'm a college student. I tend to head home on the weekends when possible to see my family. I can take the public bus to Spokane. It's about 35 to 40 minutes on the bus to get to the main station. I then have to switch buses to get to the side of the city closest to where my family would be coming from to pick me up. (I don't have a driver's license of my own. Fear of driving from a bad experience as a teenager. Yeah, I know this is going to bite me in the ass in the future.)
At this point, my mother picks me up, and we run whatever errands are necessary to get the most achieved during this trip into town. We then drive about an hour from Spokane to a small town called Newport where my family lives. We actually live about five minutes away from Newport in the opposite direction from Spokane, but the town itself is sufficient to get the point across. This is a rather small town, with only a single traffic light within city limits. The public bus does not go here because there's not enough people to warrant the expenses.
There is no way in hell I would be able to get from point A to point B without a car, even giving myself the benefit of using the bus as I currently do to knock off half of the distance. I actually discussed getting an electric car with my mother yesterday. It turns out that she had looked into it as well. It would turn my bus trip to Spokane into a hard requirement as a fully-charged battery would only be able to last going directly to Cheney and home without making any side stops to run errands.
The price of gas has gone up so high, there have been several consecutive weekends were I haven't been able to visit my family simply because we can't afford the gas to make the trip.
And I'm lucky in my situation. For any of you using Google Maps/Earth to keep track of the distances I'm mentioning, take a look at some of the central states in the country, like Iowa. A lot of locations are WAY too far apart for even public transit to be a viable option, and a lot of our smaller towns (such as Newport) don't even have much beyond basic groceries and a hardware store. You need anything else, you're making a trip into a larger city (in our case, Spokane) to buy things.
Remember: "On one side of the ocean, 100 years is a long time. On the other side, 100 miles is a long distance." (I wish I could remember where the quote was originally from)