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All successful cities are congested. Ancient Rome was congested. If you run across a city without congestion, like Detroit, you are looking at an unsuccessful city. The trick is to manage congestion.

If you built a new highway or expand the capacity of an existing highway, you have only a short time before the new or expanded highway is just as congested as before. It's called "modal split," and it's the nightmare of highway engineers.

Once you hit a tipping point, you get more bang for the buck by expanding transit, not trying to keep up with the highways. Rail-based transit has its uses in certain corridors of high density where it functions as a trunk feeder, permitting people to finish their trip by bus at a transit center node or by car at a park-and-ride node.

The Puget Sound region has been moving in that direction since Boeing started hiring again in 1984 and with the arrival of the software industry. If you read the article closely, you'll see that they're suggesting patches to existing highways rather than the broad brush of building new freeways, SR-167 and SR-509 excepted.