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Traffic levels have been the same for 60 years showing induced demand in action. No matter how many car lanes you start with, or how many you add later, they will always be full.
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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Each lane/road provides a fixed capacity (supply) of vehicles. The induced demand caused by a surplus from a newly constructed road is the economic phenomenon of demand/supply curves which tend towards equilibrium. Same for the desire to build more roads when demand meets or exceeds capacity.
https://study.com/cimages/multimages/16/supply_and_demand.gif
This happens in all areas of transportation and human activity, btw, it is not unique to cars.
The first issue is some wierd expectation that surplus (no traffic) should be the natural state (it isn't). The second issue, specific to cars, is that roads saturate very quickly and scale poorly, so the return to equilibrium (saturation) happens much faster than other forms of transportation.