Gas is about 2x as expensive in the UK. I work in London but commute (by motorcycle) from the next county.
Plenty of people commute by car even though it's considerably more expensive.
See what? Los Angeles -- whether you slice by city, county, metropolitan statistical area, or combined statistical area -- ranks nowhere near the top of per capita household vehicle miles in the United States. In fact, the Los Angeles-Long Beach combined statistical area has the second-lowest household fuel consumption in the country, just behind New York-Newark (at least according to a poorly-sourced Forbes article [1]).
Unfortunately, publicly available fuel consumption data split by city/county/Census area is much harder to find. But what I have found suggests that Forbes's ranking of Los Angeles relative to other US metro areas is probably accurate. The National Household Travel Survey [2] is likely the best source of raw data for investigating this question.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2011/05/10/am...
[2]: https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/su...
Wow, thanks for the info. As someone born and raised in LA, I never would've guessed this.
It's not about miles covered, it's about energy consumed.
100 miles on the freeway would use the same amount of fuel as 30 miles in the city with traffic.