The Oil Drum

it makes it pretty clear what's going on. Almost all the places with really cheap gas are oil exporting countries. The US is a former oil exporting country and the culture about gas use/prices was formed during that era of plentiful domestic oil, and resists easy change.

Most of these countries where petrol is expensive were never endowed with the abundance of natural resources that the US has/had.  (Even the UK which was a significant exporter of oil for a while, never really got it ingrained in the national psyche that it was rich with oil - good thing too).

Many of them have experienced periods of sustained deprivation and the necessity of shared sacrifice (e.g. WWII and its aftermath in Europe and Japan).  Gasoline is cheap in the US compared to other parts of the world because no one has presented a reasonable public case to the voters in the US as to why it should be expensive, and that it should be expensive by heavily taxing it.  Though I am a personal supporter of that idea, without an almost crisis situation imminent, the American people are not going to start handing over an extra dollar to the federal government for every dollar of gas they buy.