Unless the further-flung suburbs and exurbs are more or less depopulated, we`re just not going to see behavior start to change much. The US is really locked into a driving intensive lifestyle, and even with the political will and economic ability to change this, it would take several years for the infrastructure to be appropriately re-built.
Commercial trucking, on the other hand, may concievably be a sector where demand destruction may happen, as there are alternatives to long-distance trucking. The American rail network may need some serious investments to pick up the slack, but it would be a lot easier than rebuilding every American town and city.
In other words, how can one see that suburb people are migrating, that cities are compacting and that far-out suburbs are depopulating? Because as long as public transport infrastructure is not in place in the USE, this seems to me the most realistic event going to happen soon.
However, I know of no real statistics or figures for properly measuring this.
The fact that the housing bust has hit at more or less the same time as this dramatic rise in the price of oil also makes it harder to look at this properly. The market has been cooling off since 2004, even if it's taken until this year for the whole system to start collapsing. One of the major effects of the whole thing has been rising available stocks of new housing, and most of that new housing is located rather far from urban centers.
How much has the rising cost of commutes figured into the decline in sales, and how much of it has been caused by the various other factors behind the financial collapse? Hard to say.
