This answer might piss alot of people off, in that it's alot easier to say Exxon or the government or someone is to blame, but sorry to say, but we're kinda running out of the stuff.
The government definitely saw this coming and should have done a better job preparing truckers for the end of the road - so to speak, the taxes on US fuel are trivial in comparison to other states.
The problem is the open "world" market. Oil is set - remarkably consistently, (if not in fact fixed), so 3dollars of gas is 3 dollars of gas everywhere in the US and Australia, (which have the lowest taxes on fuel anywhere).
The use of oil by China and the rest of the world's developing economies has now equaled (in the last 2 years US consumption), the growth is about 2-3 percent on demand every year.
The problem is that the supply is actually declining, for light-sweet crude (the easiest form of oil to refine to gasoline/diesel).
The problem is we've married ourselves to oil, and inefficient use of oil, so the next few years will be quite painful, as we transition away from trucks and such and back to rail , I give it another 10-15 years before we're "through the ringer" moving alot of our long-haul stuff back to rail, but there will still be local "short-run" truckers out there.
It's gonna suck for a few years if you're a trucker, as they will have to transition to another job, perhaps engineer or conductor on the new railways.
1000 Barrels a Second - GOOD book - without being alarmist, the author shows what's going on in the marketplace .
The End of Oil - A really good introductory book for this topic.
The Long Emergency - I read this book and was a little pissed in that I thought (and would like to think still) that it's too pessimistic and alarmist, so while it is dismally pessimistic the problems the author predicts in the book, keeps happening and that keeps giving me pause.