Well, so far - and it's pretty amazing what with this unprecedented level of civil strife - that there has not been an event (as they say) at an oil terminal, refinery, or pipeline. Nor, and this is pretty huge, has there been real problems in Kingdom or the real gulf states - stuff that would really effect oil supplies. When one - or both (I'm betting on both, and sooner rather than later) - of those things happen then oil could go much, much, much (like double or more) higher.
I'm not going so far as to put on my tin foil hat but I do believe that in some cities particularly with certain kinds of a political composition it is a goal to manipulate people out of their cars and onto mass transit
Well no tin foil hat needed, it's no big secret that urban planning as a field, and urban planning schools where they teach urban planning to urban planners, who then go off and work for cities doing planning - loathe cars.
The preference has always been for real efficiency which is putting the most people in the closest possible space and making most of it self-powered. Cities where most of the people walk (or ride bikes, bikes are walking in urban planning terms) most of the time are considered by planners to be working at the most efficient level. It's really all about space and how much space you need to give over to cars (and it's huge, roads, parking, garages, infrastructure like gas stations, dealerships, etc).
The least efficient use of just about anything and everything is using a personal one to two tons of metal and plastic that's about 4x8 and is constantly and forever taking up 4x8 feet of space, and burning intense levels (as a collective whole) of a highly refined fossil fuel that as matter of routine electro/chemical processes is spewing all sorts of toxic stuff into the air we are required to breathe.
So, to a considerable degree, yeah, there are people in all sorts of different offices sitting around and trying to figure out how you can move all these people around without each one needing a car. In many places, there is just not enough room for everyone to have a car so that's a factor too.
But, I don't think that is the city you're living in Britney, you're in a place that was pretty much 100% designed with cars in mind. All the war/post-war cities of the West and Southwest were laid out from the get-go based on streets to be used by cars. It's all but impossible in that kind of sprawl to live without a car, it's just too far from any one place to the other (LA is the best/worse at that) and there is no real public transit -both intercity as well as regional (like NYC, or SF, or Chicago has) - too far to walk - if there are even places to walk - and riding a bike is pretty much an open death wish.
At least for now.
Who knows, as a geographical deal LA is really well laid out now for mass transit and bikes - most of the main areas are pretty flat - soon come, soon come. But places like NYC, Chicago, SF, and several other dense urban areas have been trying to get people out of cars for a long, long time now.
