Note that "better infrastructure" != "more highways", as traffic grows to saturate the available roads.

If you want better infrastructure, invest in light rail.

http://www.iwillride.org/what-200-people-look-like-driving-c...

I spent ~10 years living in Europe. While there was still a lot of traffic, huge numbers of people took rail. To me, the cities were much more livable than the average NA city.

Shouldn't we at least be talking about working remotely and why that doesn't happen more often?

I would bet most people have to drive in primarily because there manager did it that way when he/she was in the developer role.

Working remotely is friendlier on the environment and saves time commuting. It's also cheaper for the company and more easily scales as head count increases.

It's not just about work. Sports stadiums, bars, meetup groups, nightlife, concerts, comedy clubs, etc etc all involve bringing people into the city. Commuting is just part of the battle

Working remotely might give a town more years before they have to expand the highway due to rush hour traffic. They may work in the next town over too, so more diffuse nightlife, bars, etc... It's not a panacea, because of some of the activities you mention (stadiums), but I think it could help with infrastructure and reduce our carbon footprint.

Time and time variance on travel. I know a contractor that has moved out of Seattle because he naturally needed to go to a lot of different locations and the really long and unpredictable travel times made his work very difficult. The pay and availability of jobs will be less at his new place, but lower housing costs and little traffic made the move worth trying in his case.

> Six lanes of traffic > Cue whining about how pollution and an over-priced mass-transit utopia and high rise apartments will solve all our problems.

You do realize that six-lane highways are every bit as expensive as mass transit lines, right? And that a pair of railroad tracks down the median of that six lane highway can move a volume of people about 3x bigger than all the lanes put together?

Honestly even if you just love driving, you should be in favor of anything that will get other drivers out of their cars, because otherwise the end-state is horrific traffic for you to sit in.

There is no known way to scale up a city while keeping cars the dominant mode of transit. You can only add so many lanes before you run out of space, and long before that point you start hitting un-enlargeable bottlenecks in parts of the system that propagate outward.