Lucky. "America", ie the US, is pretty huge and empty. When I was in college, my friends would often drive about 350 miles one way to go home for the weekend/holidays. Public transportation is so much shittier here than many other "developed" countries I've lived in. Sucks because I've never owned a car lol.
I wonder if subsidised petrol also adds to it. It'd be a rare Australian (in my experience) who attempted to regularly drive between major cities (excluding Canberra) - they'd just fly.
I also get the impression that air transport in most of the rest of the world is much much more reasonable. AirAsia has made most of Asia pretty accessible, there are a gazillion competing low-cost airlines in Europe, and Australian air travel seems to be cheap enough that I have friends who city hop at weekends without much effort.
Of the four continents I've lived for more than a year on, North America and Africa see people taking heroic car journeys, Europe and (South East) Asia much less so.
Finally there seems to be a real class divide on public transport. Middle-class Europeans and Asians will jump on a coach, where I don't think any of the Americans I know have every been on a Greyhound bus...
I have ridden my share of Greyhound's man. They are always very long and if you have a bad driver they are quite scary.
Where I went to college, flights were often canceled and cost around 300$ one way. Between cities in the US we do have pretty competitive prices for flights. Cars were definitely the preferred means of transportation and if you car pooled the cheapest.
Oddly enough we had an ok bus system, it was pricy but the fare was included in your tuition.
