How the mighty Empire of America falls apart

Let's add some statistics to this picture, which says that air traffic currently answers for a magnitude more miles than any kind of transit, bus, rail etc. The picture is quite grim: while major aiports will rise more and more, the smaller airports will fall out of this network and there is nothing to replace it. I can see a very bad spiral here: as the economy gets worse, this disconnect gets worse and worse, hurting the economy more...