I think that's the wrong way to look at it: I argue that the increased traffic throughput allows for economic growth in the region:
Individuals are of course likely to only think about latency/transit time (which hasn't improved, because of the increased traffic.). The society and the local economy cares about the throughput though.
What I am saying is that from an regional economic point of view, throughput is more important that individual latency. In the context of widening highways. That is it. I did not say anything about other competing transportation methods.
That's true of everything though. All infrastructure doesn't scale. The water pipes / fiber lines / housing stock / schools / etc in the city today likely won't handle the needs of 50+ years either.
It's ok to build infrastructure to meet today's needs, even if it won't work 50+ years from now. "Perfect is the enemy of good."
Cars physically take up a very large amount of space compared to a pedestrian or person on a bike. This is why car oriented transportation scales so badly.
With highway expansion we're trying to scale up the transportation solution that is that requires the most area. This is dumb and expensive.
Better for who? Most of the people using this freeway likely don't live within decent public transit access, and the money spent here is so low, that fact wouldn't have changed for most of them.
> With highway expansion we're trying to scale up the transportation solution that is that requires the most area. This is dumb
Yes it takes up the most space. But it's also the most compatible with existing housing + job transportation, and is the most flexible in terms of arrival and departure time, and is the least likely to hurt the housing market (increase costs, gentrify area).
Trains and buses are great too, but they have their own negatives as well. This "all freeways are bad" attitude simply isn't true.
> and expensive.
This freeway project costs $22 million per mile. Yes, light rail has a higher carrying capacity for pedestrians, but it usually costs between $50 million and $100 million per mile. A lot of your "take up less space" requests explode the costs. LA's Crenshaw Line, for instance, is $165 million per mile, in part because some of it is underground.
Light rail is a great option that all cities should be investing in. But there's no need to race-to-the-bottom on transportation. LA is growing fast enough to need a freeway and more light rail. It's OK that money gets spent on some of both.
It's not like LA is ignoring public transit. There's already 11 active bus/rail projects in some state of construction right now, and many more on the way - https://www.metro.net/interactives/datatables/project/
And look how much was achieved for that money. Apparently not much. Whatever capacity gains appeared were immediately gobbled up. And what next? Scaling further will be harder and more expensive.
It's not enough to compare highway costs and transit costs independent of everything. We need to consider the long term implications of the design choices that are being made.
This point additionally references your comments about how transportation works with the existing infrastructure. We can keep doubling down on the way things have been done for the last 50 years, but I think cities need to take a step back, be more reflective about what they're doing, and work toward undoing some of the effects of bad decisions made decades earlier.
If you don't have proper urban planning a lot of things, like mass transit, will be much more expensive in the future. You need right of ways, for example.
One of the reasons that the "bullet train" between LA to SF is so ridiculously expensive is because getting the land is a lot harder than it would have been 50 years ago. In fact, they changed the route so it would be cheaper. $100 billion dollars...