Landlocked

So I started taking the bus to work most days a couple of days ago. It's not necessarily that fuel has gotten so expensive--driving 5 miles doesn't take a lot of gas--it's more that parking is a problem and there's a bus stop right outside my driveway, so I feel like I should start taking public transportation.
I guess I also feel like I'm getting ready for something. I'm preparing for a time in the very near future when our lives will be massively reorganized by the high price of transportation.
I recently had an opportunity to travel to another hemisphere for work, someplace I'd always wanted to go. I turned it down due to office politics, mostly, but I'm very worried that I will never get to go. It's not hard to imagine that soon it will cost many thousands of dollars to fly across an ocean.
People in Texas have sold their trucks and SUVs; when the students return in the fall, the mediocre public transportation infrastructure will sputter and gasp, and huge investments will have to be made to keep the city alive.
Previously I had thought that urban sprawl might not end during my lifetime, but I think it has ended. We will have to come up with a name for the contraction of populations back into urban centers that followed the age of of cheap gas and urban sprawl.