Two points:

1. Over-inflating tires. This does reduce the energy necessary to making the car go, but not because less of the tire is touching the ground. You want the tire to have good contact with the ground and lots of friction because only through friction with the ground can the car push on the road to speed the car up. Imagine if the car were on frictionless ice, you'd never get it moving.

Over-inflating the tires helps because it makes the tire stiffer. It is the flexing and changing of the shape of the tires as it turns that eats up energy from the moving car. You can understand what is happening by thinking about a rolling bowling ball and balloon filled with sand. The bowling ball barely changes shape as it moves while a balloon filled with sand has lots of internal parts that are changing shape. So, the bowling ball will roll for a longer time starting from the same speed as a balloon filled with sand.

2. The situation with slowing down is more complicated than presented. It takes energy to get a car moving. To some degree, it doesn't matter how fast you get up to speed, it's the top speed that matters most. However, your car is more efficient in higher gears and you cannot get into a higher gear if you are accelerating hard. Thus, it is to your advantage to accelerate slowly.

Slowing down doesn't really cost you fuel directly. Unless you are driving a hybrid, your brakes just throw away your energy of motion. So, slowing down unnecessarily costs you since you will need to speed up again.

The final complicating factor is wind resistance. The internal friction of your car is pretty small. If there were now wind resistance, you could get close to just turning your engine off and gliding once you reached cruising speed. However, wind resistance means that the engine has to expend energy even at speed. Worse, the wind resistance increases with the square of your speed, meaning that going twice as fast costs you four times the energy which has to come from the gas. At 50 mi/hr, you have just about half the total wind resistance of 70 mi/hr. This is a huge savings. So, in general, the more time you can spend at lower speeds, the more energy you will save.

Thus, it is not to your advantage to rush between lights since that top speed will cost you all over the place and will barely get you there faster.

3. Going into neutral is generally not that helpful. Most hills (well at least in the Bay Area) will get you going really fast -- faster than you'd want to go. To that extent, it is usually good to let the engine help you brake.