The problem is also congestion. Manual trasmission is great when there's not a lot of traffic, but it's a pain on your morning commute in LA/SF/NY/... In Europe you either live on the countryside or use public transport. Comparably few people are stuck every morning on the highway on their way to work (still a few though).
How can you make such a ridiculous and broad statement? I'm in the UK and I commute an hour to work down the motorway/highway. With traffic it's an hour and I drive a manual car like just about everyone else.
Most people I know still drive to work, even if the city where we live is pretty good for public transport with a lot of buses and trams available.
I didn't look up data before, but the data seems to confirm my statement. In the UK, 68% of the working population commutes by car [1]. In the US, it's around 88% of commuters that commute by car [2]. In London, the share of commuters by public transport is as high as 50% [3].
An article I found on citylab also confirms my statement somehow (although it refers to Berlin). [4]
Now, that this influences automatic vs. manual transmission is very subjective, I can't back that up. I could be wrong there, but the rest of the statement is at least not "rediculous".
Oh I don't doubt more people commute by car in the US at all.
Your statement was "In Europe you either live on the countryside or use public transport.", your own sources show that 60% don't use public transport and I don't know how you can be so sure that the other 40% live in the countryside. Unless by countryside you mean "live outside of a city"?
For many years I had a 70 minute commute, too, and it was a breeze in a 5-speed, even though it entailed a lot of through-town and traffic lights. On the whole I enjoyed it very much.
What wasn't any fun at all were all the 10-20 minute traffic jams when all the idiots were bumper-to-bumper, oscillating between 3 mph and zero every few seconds. First gear, neutral, first, neutral; accelerate, brake, accelerate brake. Especially on an upgrade. My clutch foot was killing me.
Depends how often you drive using a clutch. I've always driven using one so now even in long traffic jams I don't really notice my foot aching.. However when I first learned to drive it really used to ache.
