Kea Wilson wrote:

A coalition of academics from around the world modeled what would happen if all residents of a car-centric city made their transportation choices solely on the basis of how much time they would save by taking the fastest mode available to them — which, for most of them, would be a personal car. Paradoxically — but unsurprisingly — the model showed that when everyone tries to speed up their commute by hopping in the whip, they create traffic jams, slowing down average travel times about 25 percent compared to how fast they’d be if there were no other traffic on the road at all.

And thanks to the well-known law of induced demand, there’s simply no way to cut that congestion by building more lanes along the most popular routes — affirming that the only way to get rid of excessive traffic is to incentivize drivers to start using other modes of transportation by making them as fast, safe, and affordable as possible.