It's easy to imagine that this growth will continue to fill any capacity thrown at it, but that can't hold true ad infinitum, especially that peak car happened in 2017:
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter1/the-setting...
The Braess paradox is also mostly dead in the age of real-time traffic information. Anyone taking an Uber can see for themselves the sometimes weird paths they take - all because it's truly faster this way with real-time data.
Cars are more durable and last longer than cars as recently as 2000.
Product cycles have also widened such that a 5yr old car looks closer to the latest models than old&dated.
The suburbs act as a relief valve for city housing costs.
Otherwise we see a continue out-migration from urban coast blue states, to less urban, cheaper red states.
For example, the major highways through SW CT were completed by 1940 & 1960 respectively. The population is about 2x what it was then, and most families now have 2 cars instead of 1, as both spouses work whereas that wasn't as much the norm 90 years ago. So you have 2-3x the demand on essentially the same lane capacity built when my grandmother was my age.
Along with this there's also been practically zero expansion of mass transit in the area.
So damned if you do, damned if you don't in a way. We all just put up with it taking longer to get to/from work, visiting family out of state, etc. One area where our lives truly have gotten worse, and I'm not nostalgia pilled generally speaking.