Is The Era Of Personal Transportation Almost Over?

I would say, to some extent, yes.  I think we'll need to cut down on vehicle miles in the near future.  Here's Brad Plumer on the future of vehicles, after the world passed the one billion vehicle mark:

What’s stunning is how far countries like China and India still have to go. Right now, there’s one car in China for every 17.2 people, compared with one car for every 1.3 people in the United States. If China caught up to the U.S. ownership rate, the country would field a billion vehicles all by itself. And car ownership in China would have surged even faster had the country not recently scrapped a series of auto subsidies last year.
So where is this all heading? According to the International Transport Forum, the global vehicle population could reach 2.5 billion by 2050. Daniel Sperling, a professor at UC Davis’s Institute of Transportation Studies, put out a useful presentation last year running through what that two billion cars would mean. Take energy: Right now, the world produces about 87 million barrels of oil per day, and most of that comes from conventional sources. A world with two billion—or more—cars will likely require boosting that to 120 million barrels per day or beyond, Sperling argues. And, given that production from conventional wells is expected to flatten in the coming decades, getting to that level will mean relying on unconventional sources like the tar sands in Alberta.

Marketplace was talking about Chinese auto sales yesterday.  If China continues to buy vehicles rapidly, oil supplies will come under unprecedented strain.  We should have heeded the warnings when U.S. oil production peaked in 1971, but we are extremely lazy and very slow learners.  A good portion of our economic problems, both within households, and nationally, can be traced to the increase in transportation costs as we've required more imported oil.  They also featured a story on the demand for petroleum engineers.  One girl working on her doctorate pointed out how our whole way of life depends on oil.  We have constructed our living environment to revolve around automobiles, and the future will be tough because of it.  She's planning on cashing in on our dependence.  Based on past history, she's making a decent bet for the near term.  Long-term, the future is in other fields.