You are ignoring the fact that an individual will drive more if it is more convienient: Make more trips to the store, drive farther to cheaper/better stores.
That is how more cars will ‘magically’ appear.
Actually, looking at it, that list ranks countries’ average prices for premium gasoline/petrol as a multiple of the world average. The US is #102, at 0.77 times the world average price; Canada is #79 at 0.95 times, and the UK is #2, with 1.95 times the world average.
That defies the experience of most everyone who has ever driven for a long period of time in a large city, and it also defies logic.
People will generally come to accept a certain level of traffic congestion and will beging to find alternatives beyond that level. If you add more roadspace, you’ll simply attract commuters who otherwise would have given up on that road, and fill the road back up to its practical capacity.
I have seen this happen because I live near Toronto, which is crossed by the 401, which, depending on who you believe and how you define it, is either the busiest or the widest freeway in the world, or possibly both. Hre is a picture of it probably taken on a non-holiday weekend, since it’s not busy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Highway_401_Miss.jpg
They expand the 401 constantly; work on it is pretty much endless. And you know what? It’s always just as jammed at rush hour as it’s ever been. The more lanes they add, the more they fill. It’s an absolute nightmare.
It isn’t just public transportation in town - if trains here were like trains in Europe and I could get reliable, on time, frequent rail service anywhere in the country I wanted to go, hell yeah I would. Imagine how much better it would be to hop on a train, take a book and a portable DVD player, and not have to drive somewhere! The only thing better is if there were good public transportation when you got there!
Short answer: Because you don’t live in San Diego.
I get twelve cubits to the hogshead and thats the way I likes it.
Really? My bike uses two square millimetres, on average.
Oh, look, the goalpost moved from “more people will drive” to “the same people will drive more”.
This “luxury driving” you describe isn’t likely to happen to such a degree that the roads become horribly congested again, rendering the act of improving the road entirely ineffective and “stupid”, now is it? As the road approaches being congested again, the luxury drivers will be deterred again, since they didn’t really want to go to the store just yet anyway; they were just called out by the open road. Eventually something like equilibrium will set in, running close to the increased capacity of the road, which, being increased, will be more effective at moving cars the the prior, unimproved status of the road.
Let’s all take a moment to all recognize that the practice of fixing and improving roads is not a perfected art. And, sometimes, what’s done is not enough to solve all the problems. However, if the work on the road does increase the number of cars that can move down that road in a given span of time, then the improvement was not a total failure from a cost-effectiveness standpoint.
(This is true even if the road still runs at top congestion after the fix; it just might be at top congestion for a little less time. Which is not to say that that Toronto road couldn’t be improved a little more ambitiously; perhaps from now on every time they widen the road, they should double the lane count. Eventually they’d beat the congestion, if for no other reason than having eliminated the places people were going by paving over the entire city. 
)
Anyway, it’s starting to sound like the counterarguments are merging into “if as many or more people can get their cars through with as much or less trouble, then this is a bad thing and doing it was stupid.” This is not a position that I choose to waste my time arguing with; if your desires include hampering people to the degree that they have no choice but to revert to foot travel, that’s your business. However I still dispute that it is common in the US, especially in the vast, vast tracks of rural US, where little to no public transportation exists, for there to be people peeking out their curtains and saying “There’s lots of cars out there, I’d better walk the three miles to work instead. If only there was another lane out there; then, at last, I could drive!”
One thing I’d like to see is more of those small, European “City Cars” come over the pond here to the US, I’d LOVE a tiny 2-seater with a small, efficient diesel engine that I could run on Biodiesel.
I’m the only one in my car 99% of the time, so even a Saturn Ion is overkill for my purposes, something the size of the Smart FourTwo with a Diesel would be ideal for me
then there’s the other problem with the small Euro city cars, due to the exclusivity and exoticness they seem to have over here, they tend to be priced out of the realm of affordability, vehicles like the Mini, the Smart, and the small Japanese commuters like the Yaris and Fit seem to grow in price as they cross the ocean, they also lose those nice, fuel-sipping diesels and end up with tiny gasoline engines
This 'Meracin wants an inexpensive Diesel Smart, dammit…
See, we all don’t want to drive gas guzzlers, that’s a stereotype, when my Ion was being repaired from it’s collision damage, I was given a '07 Chevy Malibu as a rental, and I hated it, it was too big, got crappy fuel mileage (25MPG City) and handled like a couch, I hated the bloody thing
Heck, I just figured out the fuel mileage from my Ion’s first tank of gas and I’m quite dissapointed (25.5 MPG City/light highway, mostly city), but apparently the Ecotec four takes a few thousand miles to “break in” and reach it’s optimal fuel mileage numbers, some Ion drivers have reported combined mileage of 36-38, and highway miles up to 40
We need some safe, fuel efficient micro-cars over here, be they domestic or import, I don’t care, I want a Smart-type diesel commuter car, pre-GM-Assimilation Saturn would have been the perfect company to do this…
C’mon, GM, Chrysler, heck, even ford, design and market an inexpensive, safe, fuel efficient little diesel commuter car
Heck, GM or Ford, if you design said microcar, you could even design it to be stored in the back of one of your thyroidal SUV’s or trucks in lieu of the spare tire, as a sort of “backup car”
Just think, the driver of a Chevy Subdivision (the only vehicle capable of being seen from orbit) has a breakdown, they simply back their microcar out of the back/bed of their truck, and motor off to find a service station/tow truck/whatever
Seconding the wanting on a minicar; I don’t need a trunk and a back seat; just make a backseat with an access hatch to conveniently act as a trunk. (I do want to have some sort of trunk, though. I can’t fit all my junk in a single passenger seat.) And it’s high time we saw some kind of small non-unleaded-gasoline-only vehicle as an affordable alternative. (Admittedly, my definition of “affordable” can walk under most other peoples without ducking or brushing, but still, the sooner they release ‘cheap’ mini-eco-cars, the sooner I can buy a used one.)
Though, even assuming they wanted to make these things (which I doubt), one wonders how they’re going to get a small, light, eggshell on wheels to pass safety standards. That could slow things down. 
“It’s so popular, nobody goes there anymore.” 
They already do just not in the US. Even the fuel friendly Auzzies get their version of the GM Corsa and as well as the Focus Ford are sending the Fiesta to the US.
Ridiculous. By the way, may I interest you in this fabulous home? I have an interesting loan offer for you.
I’ve attempted to read and digest the technical details behind the scenes and I have failed to understand it. As far as I can tell it’s heads they win, tails we lose. But I think part of the reason why we haven’t seen a near panic reaction is because a lot of otherwise intelligent people who should know better seem to believe, via the official line, that this is all very temporary and caused by a few bad apples here and there and will go away soon. It’s fun reading the excuses:
- Speculators
- Environmentalists
- Big Oil collusion
- Arabs
- Hugo Chavez
- The Russians
- Mexicans
- Damned Liberals won’t let us drill in ANWR
- Falling dollar (true to an extent, but…)
- Insert your own fun reason why oil’s $/bbl has grown by a factor of eight in as many years as long as it doesn’t involve the demand curve going above the supply curve by 1mbd for several years.
But hey, we’ll be fine in the short term. There is an enormous amount of waste in the system which can be safely eliminated. Like they say, the greatest untapped super field in the world is when Americans realize their current driving habits are balls to the wall insane.
BTW, there are some good weather related reasons which could be used for recent bumps in crude prices. I’m surprised they haven’t been used yet, at least as far as I’ve seen (those would be the castrophic flooding in Mexico’s Tobasco region and the evacuation of personnel from the rigs by Norway thanks to various storms – of course, if you did bring those up people might wonder about, say, the health of the Cantarell well or ask what happened to the great boom of the 80s for North Sea exploration and that obviously just wouldn’t do).
I’ve been watching the newly-released dvd edition of The Rookies from 1972-3 (before the first Arab oil embargo in '73) and they have some shots of gas station price signs in the L.A. area. 30.9 cents per gallon. Oh, for the good old days. Oh, and Tyne Daly, in episode 22 of 23, is as skinny as Karen Carpenter.