Your claim is this:
> Additional highways are at-best a stop-gap for day-to-day traffic, never a solution, due to induced demand
That claim is false and is not a straw man because you actually claim it.
Improving mass transit might work as an alternate solution, sometimes, in specific contexts.
That doesn't prove that adding more lanes wouldn't also work, and it's also not universally true.
A large fraction of the traffic on I-95 is trucks. How many semi truck drivers and their loads can you fit on a public bus?
Many highways are congested at a specific choke point. You could make a completely free thousand mile an hour bullet train to transport people from one side of the choke point to the other and solve nothing because people would get to the other side without a car and be unable to get the last ten miles to their destination. But once you get past the choke point, the traffic diverges in every direction and there is no longer enough density to justify a mass transit route.
Sometimes you just need a wider road.