The time savings get cancelled out, but that's an incorrectly narrow view of things. Everyone who moved farther away concretely benefits in terms of bigger and/or cheaper accomodations. There is still a net benefit, just not in commute time.

> Everyone who moved farther away concretely benefits in terms of bigger and/or cheaper accomodations.

The rest of us suffer, in terms of increased environmental impact and ongoing infrastructure maintenance cost. We should not subsidize this behavior.

Nope, even the people who don't move benefit from reduced housing costs as people moving away frees up space.

Wrong. If you want more space, you need to build more densely. All this does is drive up housing prices farther away, encouraging people to move even farther away. The whole thing is completely unsustainable.

Let's do a thought experiment. Today, Highway A that links suburban region A to city B has 2 lanes and there are Y number of people that can make a certain commute in a certain amount of time.

We widen it to 4 lanes. We get 7-10 years of reduced congestion that steadily gets worse until we are at the same level of congestion.

Casting aside that temporary reprieve, which in itself adds value, the carrying capacity even at current levels of congestion has doubled, do we've now opened up another Y number of people with the option to make that commute.

So when it's all said and done, the number of people that can make that commute has doubled, even if the time it takes remains the same.

Still a win in terms of opening up options and mobility. More trucks can make deliveries. More people can commute to work.

The temporary reprieve's value is probably a minute or two each direction saved tops. The cost for that is also not paid for by the people using it.

>The temporary reprieve's value is probably a minute or two each direction saved tops.

Do you have a source for that? How could you possibly know without knowing current distance and average speed?

The problem with that logic is opportunity cost. What improvements to public transit could have been done with that thick wad of cash? Often (usually?) ones that would open up options and mobility to far more people.

Actually not. The highway allows undense spread out development. While you can build transit to those areas, to have useful transit (meaning stop every 5 minutes, not too many detours, and few transfers) you end up spending far more capital to build lightly used lines that are expensive to operator because so few people are on them (even if we assume private cars are illegal there wouldn't be many riders).

Note that not dense is the important part of the above. If you are willing to allow dense development (which most zones in the US prohibit) everything changes.

>If you are willing to allow dense development (which most zones in the US prohibit) everything changes.

Yep, this is the answer to it all: we need to build much more densely, and people need to get used to not having a big McMansion with a gigantic lawn.