But how much of the auto consumption is really "choice" in the sense you say? We had a decent light rail system in the U.S. It was shut down. Massive amounts of public subsidy went to building highways and other forms of subsidy to suburb infrastructure at the expense of urban infrastructure. Cities continue to subsidize suburbs today. And even there, I doubt even the most hard core driver likes commuting tailpipe to tailpipe crawling along at 5 miles per hour. I suspect a lot of people who love driving would still be willing to commute via mass transit given a decent mass transit system. For that matter, even talking about cars, a lot of the shift to the worst gas hogs (SUVS) and such is due a combination of loopholes in CAFE standards, and weird tax breaks for large vehicles. And a lot of really bad choices that have kept electric cars from becoming commerial. So when you talk about passenger cars and passenger light truck consumption, at least a good part of the miles driven are not due to individual choice, and a good part of the fuel consumption per mile driven is not due to individual choice.
The whole individual choice/social choice argument is a fairly sterile chicken/egg argument anyway. Bad social choices make bad individual choices more attractive, make bad social choices easier to sell, make bad individual choices more attractive. Figuring out how to break the cycle is more important than figuring out when it first started spinning. (Huh, weird parallel there to the Buddhist doctrine of the importance of ending the cycle of karma vs. holding views as to its details of its exact nature.)
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