[CalRobert]

Speak for yourself. I'm referring to both, having spent most of my life in California and half a decade in Europe (ish - Ireland is peripheral in more than one sense).

There are some differences wrt property taxes, etc. but for the most part, roads are an all you can drive buffet, if you're in a car that is, so of course people use them without regard to cost. My taxes pay for roads but I only get a sliver of them as a bike lane on some of the thoroughfares in the city. Even the motorway tolls are laughably low; a few Euro at most barring one tunnel.

As always you can find exceptions. French motorways begin to cost enough to matter. Demand-priced parking and Express lanes in California have brought something resembling sanity to space allocation where it was obviously desperately needed. But for the most part my point stands.