Many people commute to Los Angeles by highway for >1 hour each way every day (for some, it’s 2 hours each way), with much of the trip stuck in bumper-to-bumper

Many people commute to Los Angeles by highway for >1 hour each way every day (for some, it’s 2 hours each way), with much of the trip stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. This is an absolutely miserable waste of human time, gasoline, CO2 emissions and other air pollution, automobile construction, road construction/maintenance, and so on. If our municipal planning put denser housing (doesn’t need to be Hong Kong here, just 5-story apartment buildings would be fine) and denser employment space next to train/subway stations, so that more people could live within walking / transit distance of their workplaces, we could save huge amounts of resources and human happiness. Empty highways are amazing for automobile speed and flexibility. But highways scale very poorly to higher amounts of traffic. They’re great for cross-country road trips. But for routine commuting, especially once they start filling up, they’re pretty well the worst available option. And that isn’t even getting into the harmful effect the highway has on the neighborhoods it goes through. For nearby residents, a highway is like a combination of the inaccessibility of a river + the noise and air pollution of a factory, running 24–7.