Better cars mean more sprawl. If you want to accomplish something, work for free public transit.

Forcing manufacturers to build cars that get better gas mileage will only have a very negligible effect on sprawl.  People don't live far from work because their cars get good mileage; they do so because they either don't like the communities near their work or can't afford the type of home they want in those communities.  While free public transit coupled with good transit systems -- which necessarily means either underground subway systems and eliminating private motor vehicles from some bus routes -- will get more people out of cars, it won't influence people who don't want, or claim they can't afford, to live in cities to begin with.

...anyway, given increasing fuel prices.  There are a large variety of cars which already do much better than 35MPG, so it's not as if we can't already achieve those standards.

Why would you think that?

Sprawl is a matter of bad zoning.
Workplaces are zoned together, living spaces are zoned seperately, and commercial areas are zoned away from both.

So, you work in one place, and drive to another.  It was the Model of the future a generation or two ago...but it's ghastly archaic today.

Plus, in areas where the zoning overlaps (cities), the education infrastructure is so dilapidated, no one wants to raise a family there...so they move away to the suburbs.

More MPG will just mean they save more $, and cause less pollution along the way.  Of all the long(er) distance commuters I know, none break down the gas cost to the MPG...it's just "gas."  And that gets factored into the whole equation.

Increased gas costs help keep the people I know working further away, because the higher wages are even more important...

George Bush and the US Senate should be deeply ashamed of advancing the self-destruction of the human species. "Bush" will forever be a "four letter word". Scientists agree that global climate change, assisted and accelerated by human activities, is well under way and must be reversed inside of the next 10 years or dire circumstances will strike. Bush's crime is to enshrine "too little, too late" as the policy of the US. Senate Republicans share the blame. Weak Democratic members of the House should be condemned for giving in to Republican and Senate short-sightedness. The "President from Oil" has assured maximum oil company profits (as stockpiles shrink), pork-barrel biofuels boondoggles, and pathetically inadequate levels of energy conservation and auto efficiency (CAFE standards). The loss of real financial and policy supports for solar, wind, energy conservation, and energy efficiency (costing millions compared with many billions for oil and auto industries) will guarantee anguish and suffering that will make the 1929 market crash and subsequent depression look like a warm summer holiday. Grandchildren worldwide will curse December 18, 2007, and the US, with a level of contempt that far exceeds September 11.