The "build more roads, people fill them with more cars" is just a symptom of a huge problem that's existed for so long that people can't see it anymore- that th

The "build more roads, people fill them with more cars" is just a symptom of a huge problem that's existed for so long that people can't see it anymore- that there's orders of magnitude more demand for intra-city transport than there is supply. The problem isn't a law of nature; keep giving people more ways to get from A to B and eventually you'll reach the point where you have more routes than people to travel them. ...But, in a car-based society, this won't happen until your entire city is a single level surface of pavement. There is no way to get the required efficiency out of a system where one person usually takes up a full 6'-by-10' lot of street space, and where speed is limited by the inherent dangers of having multi-ton masses of steel and aluminum passing within feet of pedestrians. Self driving cars might up throughput by a factor of two; I'd estimate we need about a factor of a hundred before we can call the problem solved.