Um, you could solve most congestion simply by staggering working hours.

The problem is that even the Bay Area can't seem to pull this off.

Single people are generally fine. But the moment you have kids, you are now on regimented schedules that force you into some semblance of 9-5 ... and now you're part of the problem.

Solving it is better than continuing to live with it.

The point they're making is that the only possible solution is to solve the land use problem, so that the majority of people can live lives that don't require individual automobiles. Broadly speaking, this means building densely enough that walking, biking, and mass transit are suitable for most trips.

Yes, their point is clear enough.

My point is that the politics of landuse are hopeless enough that other mitigations will be more beneficial for quite some time to come.

I disagree, I think the politics of land use are more easily solvable than the simple physics problem of too many cars, not enough space. Plenty of other countries in the world (and even some US cities) have solved the land use problem to the point that most people don't use space-inefficient private vehicles to get around. It's solvable and there are working models to emulate. This is not true of your alternative.

It's not financially possible to fix this quickly. You're talking about tens of trillions of dollars in new housing, at a minimum. Then all the commercial, infrastructure, etc. on top of it.

That's the part I'm missing with this land use discussion. This isn't Sim City. Yes, mistakes were made, but shit's there now and nobody's moving unless they really get paid for it.

How does Northern Wisconsin emulate the Randstad? Does everybody move to Green Bay?

Does Northern Wisconsin have bad traffic congestion? Which cities are you talking about exactly?

So we all just need to compress our cities until they achieve NYC density?

Nope, doesn't have to be nearly that dense. Just get rid of SFH-only zoning and the required density will be reached over time.

So much health care is just to mitigate population control failures. More health care is solving the wrong problem.

So much computing is just to mitigate math education failures. More computing is solving the wrong problem.

Etc.

Thank goodness some people are willing to innovate.

No OP but I think you are misunderstanding the position:

Solve the land misuse problem and everything else follows

Self driving cars seems more realistic