While many of the tunnels would bore through a mountain, I was surprised to find a number of places where the autobahn entered a very expensive bored tunnel while the original road continued along fine though a perfectly passable valley floor. This was in Austria. I mean it was bored through a mountainside but it didn't have to be. In other places it would just have been built on the surface. However, as pointed out, that would mean it would get snowed on, get blocked by avalanches etc. Obviously a tunnel is more reliable (if more boring and more asphixiating -- a breakdown in a 20km long tunnel would be pretty scary) but the cost seems staggering. There are many places in the USA where a tunnel would really gain something major and they can't find funding for it.

As for the price of gas, I don't know if it really has to do with whether you have to pay for education or health care. Americans are paranoid about the price of their gasoline. Any politician thinking of raising it to world price would be committing suicide, or so it is thought. The reality is that while would gas prices would cause an ouch, for most of the middle class it would not be an unbearable one.

And no, I wasn't thinking one should drive in the old towns, but one does drive up to the edge of them, and it's good that everybody knows just what to do at that edge.

Bottled waters vary on how green they are. A large fraction of bottled waters are imported, sometimes from ridiculous distances. (Obviously Italian and French bottled waters are not going nearly so far to Germany as they are to North America, but it's still a lot further than local water is coming.) Flavoured drinks are usually made with local filtered water at a local bottling plant, but yes, they are not as green as plain tap water.

I'm a big guy, I drink a lot of water and having $8/bottle mineral water could sometimes double the price of a meal for me. But yes, many restaurants have historically tried to make their money off drinks, though mostly on the alcohol side. Of course, with $1.47 euros, the prices look higher to tourists than they do to locals.

And on room prices, we did indeed find that pensions and gasthauses meant for local tourists were much more nicely priced. In the ski areas, under 20 euros/person in spite of it being January for a room and breakfast. When I'm road tripping, I don't do much more than sleep in the hotel so like to stay in affordable simple places rather than 4-stars, which make more sense when doing multiple nights.