This is a tremendous point. Driving to and fro work has always seemed like an extension of the work day to me. When I lived in Houston, Boston or Kansas City in my Trotskyite heyday, I always had to drive to work and it was a major drag. One of the reasons I was anxious to move back to NY was so I could use public transportation. When I am on the bus in the morning, reading the NY Times, and flirting with women, I feel relatively free. The thought of driving to work, as some of my co-workers do, seems horrible.
One of the points made a week or two ago in a David Harvey thread on M-I was the contradictions between the long and short term needs of the working class. In the short term, it is crucial to keep auto workers employed. They have more social power when they are in union jobs in heavy industry. In the long term, we have to replace cars.
The whole question of transportation, housing and personal relations get intertwined. One of the aims of the Bauhaus school was to create new housing structures that would foster greater class and human solidarity. One of the failures of contemporary socialism is that we can no longer theorize what such solutions might look like today.
I personally am convinced that one of the greatest social ills in America is loneliness. You can look at a glossy magazine like New York and see hundreds of personal ads. Highly successful yuppies can not make connections with the opposite or same-sex. This is related to the atomization of the modern urban milieu. Even in the case of people who are in long-term relationships, the loneliness can exist, or even be greater.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)