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" The statistic only demonstrates that freeways aren't being built as fast as they're needed. Freeways don't breed more people to drive on them.

There are a finite number of people that could possibly drive the cars to fill your freeways, and at some point there are enough lanes to handle them."

Excellent point! Do you notice that instead of building new freeways all we do is widen the existing freeways. This ends up drawing traffic to the same freeway and causing diversions and wasting of fuel.

Imagine a city that has 2 freeways leading into the downtown area, built in the sixties. One goes due north 10 miles to reach downtown from our suburban community, it is the adjacent freeway. We used to have a job downtown, but since the eighties we work in another suburb due east of downtown, only 14.14 miles from where we live as the crow flies, but it is all surface streets.

We end up driving downtown where the Adjacent Freeway meets the Opposite Expressway to reach our job. There is a lot of traffic doing this in both directions, so the freeway is congested. Both freeways are being widened at great expense to accommodate the new traffic.

Still we end up with a 40 mile round trip commute. Somewhere archived are drawings for the unbuilt hypotenuse freeway, drawn up in the sixties but gathering dust since the environmentalists got them stopped. To bad for us, because we could have a 28 mile round trip, saving time, fuel and nerves.