The infrastructure investment around cheap gas is one of the main causes of poverty in America.
I can agree with you that suburban sprawl means people who live there, but the major cities and the rural areas predate the car. I think you are being a bit hyperbolic with that claim.
This suggests that raising the price would not cause much stress.
No, that doesn't follow at all. You would first have to find out why the poor still have to drive as far as they do and why they don't carpool.
America has screwed itself badly in the last 50 years by knocking down its cities and replacing them with a network of high speed roads connecting empty parking lots.
I don't know if you know the story of why that happened, but I'll mention it as an aside because I found it quite interesting. It was because of the cold war. The federal government made not only recommendations, but policy directed toward making cities less dense so they would be survivable in the event of a nuclear attack on cities. Of course it helped that the U.S. was the Saudi Arabia of the 1950s, so the concept of running out of oil was on no one's radar, except maybe M. King Hubbert.
The root cause is the belief that the goal of infrastructure investment should be increasing consumption instead of increasing wealth.
As someone who has worked with transportation planners, I can assure you that such is not the case. They are trying to fix immediate transportation needs based on sprawl that happened decades ago based on what I mentioned above.
Utilities are rewarded for producing cheap electricity, instead of growing the economy or even providing energy service such as warm buildings, adequate lighting.
They do grow the economy by making power cheap. Electricity is a cost to businesses and by keeping power cheap, businesses remain profitable that would otherwise have to lay off employees. In some industries, electricity exceeds the cost of labor. The utilities were never designed, nor do they have the capacity today, to provide warm building and adequate lighting. It is the job of others to do that, though many utilities offer guides on how to use less of the product they use, because there are incentives for them to do so.
The result is vast overcapacity.
That does not follow either. The utilities build what is required to serve their customers. Period.
The maintenance of this over capacity paralyzed public hand and locks the poor into high consumption lifestyles. That is the main cause of poverty today in America.
Your thesis is built on sand. The cause of poverty today is the lack of jobs that pay well. Why is that the case?
Automation.
Offshoring of jobs.
Leadership that refuses to tariff goods from countries with poor working conditions and environmental regulations.
Perverse incentives via taxation. (The poor pay more in taxes as a percent of income.)