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I think "it will actually accomplish the goal you claim to want to accomplish" is kind of a bare minimum. I don't know why this is suck a sticking point.
I'm sure there are cases where expanding a road is the right call; it just isn't common.
Ok, and? Yes, in or near a growing city, especially, you want more space available to housing, stores, offices, etc. 50 years ago Austin's population was a 1/4 million, now it's 1 million and still growing. Space has become more valuable and it's a lot more likely that transit makes economic sense (not that it actually takes a huge city to make transit viable).
Sure; actual usage depends on how the city is designed. If you build massive roads everywhere (even in the middle of downtown), force the buses to sit in traffic, have one tram line with a handful of stops, subsidize parking, require private entities to provide excessive parking, legally ban dense housing in most places, etc. then people will drive a lot. If you don't do that, then people will use other methods of transportation.
Similarly, if the roads are congested, actual capacity will also be much lower. 2,000 cars per hour per lane, or a bit less than 2 seconds between vehicles, is about the absolute maximum when traffic is free-flowing (and already isn't particularly safe
It is easy to increase capacity on transit, for example by adding more frequent train service. (Note that adding lanes to a highway makes it less pleasant for each user, since they have to move over more lanes, while adding trains makes it more pleasant for each train rider, since they have to wait less).
It's also easy to implement congestion pricing on transit, which many places already do. If you did this on the highways, you would see reduced traffic.
It's possible for transit to carry vastly more people (see capacity infographic above), which means the point where it becomes overcrowded is much later, and only achieved in a few places. Every city in the world has car traffic, because the threshold of how many cars you can put in a city is so small. Most cities are literally never going to be Mumbai.
That would be an improvement (still wouldn't solve the other issues)... but again, with congestion pricing, you wouldn't have so much congestion to begin with, that's the whole point!
You could replace some of the existing road. There's quite a lot of it near the highway, frontage roads are common in Texas. I-35 through most of Austin is 2-4 lanes of frontage road each side, plus 3-4 lanes of highway.
So this is the best way to have people get around? Sitting around in constant traffic, completely wasting thousands of hours of human life every single day, in every single city? But they can get places... eventually. Sounds completely dystopian.
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