Luckily I work from home and have a lot of stores within walking distance so I only filled my gas tank about 6 times last year. Even so, price per gallon as it pertains to what I put directly into my car isn't my primary concern.

As others have mentioned previously it will translate into higher prices for electricity and such. But it won't stop there. Higher gas prices will eventually affect the prices of all the goods we buy, across the board, no matter what they are...

In any case, for the short term people who have to drive a while to get to work, or spend a lot of that drive time in heavy traffic are going to feel it first if they have no access to mass transit of some sort.

An influx of people taking mass transit will affect those prices as well as mass transit makes moves to cope.

And of course people spending more of their paycheck on gas and less on other goods are going to affect the economy in other ways.

But that's all worse case scenario stuff.