Exactly this. Basically the 'demand' for driving is already > than the 'capacity' for driving, so adding capacity doesn't decrease congestion, it stays at 100%. This was made explicitly clear in the crash of 2000 when it felt like roughly 25% of the work force seems to have moved out of the Bay Area, traffic congestion got a lot less.
If the theory of 'induced demand' was accurate, then traffic congestion would not have changed, and that would have been something worth writing about.
This exactly. This article didn't even try to objectively validate the report. It's also provably false in other areas like already not very busy roads in the high desert in SoCal. Add a new road to Apple Valley and I bet it gets used but very little there's just no demand.
This report was highly biased since I'm sure no one built a road where people didn't need one and looked if demand were the same. Instead this is only about building roads where they were deemed to be critical enough to warrant a ton of spending and where the built out supply probably lags demand.
If the theory of 'induced demand' was accurate, then traffic congestion would not have changed, and that would have been something worth writing about.