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Seriously, there is a lot of non-essential, non-commuting farting around on the roads. A LOT. It's so cheap to do most people don't give it a second thought.
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While true, it is probably only about 3k miles a year for the more extreme cases. I added up all my non-essential driving over this year so far, including cruising around with friends, hooligan-esque activities, and 'road trips', and it's around 1,800 miles. We do stupid things involving motor vehicles almost every week.
Cruising along city streets at 20-30 mph really doesn't use many gallons per hour. You get a lot more time operating a vehicle per gallon of gas used than mundane highway speed commuting, where you will cover twice the distance in less than half the time(even though highway fuel economy will give better gas mileage).
When I was a teenager, having a job close enough to walk and not using a car to commute to school, my driving was completely discretionary, and added up to about 3k miles per year.
Now, I have ~8k miles of commuting a year, and ~2k miles that is discretionary.
The bulk of the driving that is done in most cases is probably commuting. Unless we get a good mass transit system in place, this will not change in the U.S. People will keep buying gas and driving to work so long as the amount of money they make at work outweighs the cost of transportation. Once the economics change, many people will quit going to work, as has happened in rural California and elsewhere once $3.00/gallon came.
I'm sure someone might have some real numbers on hand(eg. Americans commute an average of X miles per day but drive a total of X miles per day), to throw a little facts into this discussion, instead of my heresay.
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