There's a multitude of issues that individual citizens have a very hard time solving or getting around.

In the majority of the US (and the world, really) people have to own cars to get from A to B in order to survive (which coincidentally means we're spending untold billions on the infrastructure to support that habit, at the cost of the liveable environment and citizens wallets, whether they drive or not).

Changing that is an enormous undertaking that will require an equally huge societal shift. In a culture where the car is the obvious choice it is next to impossible to get citizens to see that that choice is fucking them, and I'm sure Big Oil won't ever do anything to change that perception because it will hit their bottom line. So unless you move to a city where you can live without a car and still have the (positive) freedom to go where you need to be you will need to vote and write your congressman to make it possible for you to live without the yoke that is the car.

So yes, citizens burn gasoline because they must do so in order to afford a living. Further, as an aside, if people made the amount of money congruent with their productivity then maybe they wouldn't have to commute so much in order to have a roof over their head and food on the table. We could relax production and increase leisure time. Maybe. I'm just some dumb cunt.