Forty years ago maybe but not so much these days; especially when you average in people from say NYC and other dense city-scapes. Now I would say its more like one-in-forty-thousand. 
Seriously, it is very much like it was with smoking those same forty years ago. Different reasons and motivations but more and more people seem to be looking for a way out of driving as a need. We’ll never see a time without cars any more than we will a day without some sort of tobacco but I do see maybe living enough to see “driving lite” (high mileage or alternative fuel cars) and less people making daily long drives their first choice more the norm than the exception. It will have its own problems (like gentrification) but it will be interesting.
Gas is famously inelastic. Inelastic doesn’t mean consumers are completely unresponsive to changes in price, just that it takes a disproportionately large change in price to get the same effect.
And while there is merit to your orbital laser approach (though watch out for the externalities, that vapor and ash has to go somewhere), the core problem is that while some people will stay home if travel is too expensive, people still gotta eat, so people have gotta get to work, which means that there’s a collection of people who are going to keep cluttering up the freeway unless you literally destroy their life. (Which is why fuel costs are so inelastic.) You wanna get those people off the road, you have to provide viable alternatives.
Rarely do I drive more than a few blocks (Mrs. Homie and I both work from home), but when I do drive more than a few blocks, I’m driving 30-40 miles at a minimum, living as I do in a small town in the middle of nowhere. That makes high gas prices a once-every-few-weeks annoyance, rather than a daily one.