That's actually too rosy a picture of the situation in Europe. While indeed many people have no objective need to own a car, most families do own at least one. We might not have quite the ridiculous amount of cars as the Americans, but large parts of Europe are not that far behind. [1]

More importantly - since this discussion is about driver behavior - if you look at traffic deaths per vehicle, per driven kilometer, or even per inhabitant, the US do better than a lot of European countries. [2] I'm sure that the total disregard for the existing bans on cellphones [3] for drivers is a factor here.

Also, regrettably, Europeans are repeating the mistake that I hear some US cities are now regretting: building giant shopping areas outside the city centers, thereby destroying commerce in those centers and worsening the traffic situation. In one particularly megalomaniac example [4] they want to build a giant shopping center right next to one of the busiest roads in Belgium (the ring around Brussels), less than 10km away from several existing and perfectly fine city centers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_p... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re... [3] http://www.cellular-news.com/car_bans/ [4] http://www.uplace.eu/Default.aspx?PageID=166&Culture=nl