It comes from the fact that the drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco is the same as the drive from Paris to Zurich. The interstate freeway system allows you to rapidly cross vast expanses of nothing that aren't common anywhere but Africa and Central Asia and in town, the roads are designed to emulate the interstate freeway system. Find a bike path. Ride it. Google actually does a pretty good job of giving you bike directions these days. According to Runkeeper I've biked 3500 miles in the past two years. My total investment was $800 for the bike in 2009, three sets of tires, a replacement crank, sprocket and two chains.
Yeah, I guess I didn't factor in how long distances might affect driving attitudes. I think most people from outside of the US and certainly many who don't tend to drive long stretches within the US forget how enormous the place is. That's a whole lot of mileage on a bike!
The freeway system explains so much gigantism in the American car ethic. I remember driving around Switzerland and noting that the widest lanes there are about as wide as the lanes on bridge decks in the US. The widest lanes in the US, on the other hand, are about as wide as the narrowest parking lots over there. Fun fact: Soviet armor was explicitly designed to weigh less than American armor so that Soviet/Iron Curtain bridges could be built that would support Soviet tank columns but collapse under the weight of American tank columns. Tankers in the Red Army couldn't be over 5'8."