That's true to some degree. However, much of our infrastructure are designed for 1000 year timescales but rely on technologies with far shorter timescales.
There are plenty of alternatives to powering our cars, but none currently (and none on the horizon either) that are as good (cost effective) as petroleum. The cost-benefit analysis will be changing, but we won't be able to adapt because our communities rely on cheap fuel. People will have the unenviable choice of paying an arm and a leg commuting, or letting their exurban communities (and the massive investment they represent) fall back into farm land.
Y'know, suburban and exurban communities are a conundrum: They bear a lot of the blame for the incipient energy crash, but they may be one of the average joe's best assets in surviving it. It's similar to the systemic inefficiencies in the Soviet system allowed an industrial buffer during their collapse (ref. Dmitri Orlov's essays). This inefficiency will let people convert that half acre of useless lawn into a garden bearing a good percentage of the food a family needs, the same way durable goods piled up in warehouses because of the Soviets' command-directed economy could be used and traded by those with access. Turn the local park into less-intensively-improved land growing staple cereals, and you've gone most of the way converting a suburb to a village that can at least subsist at a 17th century level.
There are plenty of alternatives to powering our cars, but none currently (and none on the horizon either) that are as good (cost effective) as petroleum. The cost-benefit analysis will be changing, but we won't be able to adapt because our communities rely on cheap fuel. People will have the unenviable choice of paying an arm and a leg commuting, or letting their exurban communities (and the massive investment they represent) fall back into farm land.