All of the major freeway expansions I have experienced required at least two years to complete. During these periods, lanes in the construction zone were heavily constricted, resulting in all of the roads surrounding the expansion project being completely filled with stop-and-go traffic during peak hours until the projects were completed, which seems to suggest the number of lanes makes some kind of a difference in something, somehow.

The authors seem to suggest that demand for roads is infinite, as expanding roads merely increases the number of trips people choose to make, thus infinite expansion will result in infinite trips.

These analyses always appear to me as if they are without any understanding of how humans actually behave, resulting in nonsensical nonsense "laws".

> The authors seem to suggest that demand for roads is infinite, as expanding roads merely increases the number of trips people choose to make, thus infinite expansion will result in infinite trips.

Agree. They literally claim this with “increasing lane kilometers by 1% will increase VKT by 1.03%” but subtly acknowledge that this fundamentally doesn’t make sense with the hand-wavey “any feasible increase in roadways will have no impact on congestion”. Keyword feasible.

The real law doesn’t seem to be that congestion rises to meet capacity but that no one will ever fund enough road expansion to make peak congestion low.