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The problem is that demand has other consequences.

I drive 2-3 times a year from NY to South Carolina or Florida for years, always timing crossing through DC around 5AM. Traffic 15-20 years ago coming into DC extended down to Potomac Mills. When I passed though in 2019 it extended almost 60 miles, well past Fredericksburg!

More demand drives more sprawl that drives more demand for roads. Eventually metastasizes into a nightmare like LA or Long Island!

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Part of the reason there is unusually high traffic in that location is the confluence of two things: one is that local traffic doesn’t have a great alternative to 95 over the Rappahannock river (the local Rt. 17/1 interchange is famously awful) so you take 95, and the other is that there is a large amount of truck traffic between Rt. 17 and 95. Basically over the span of the Stafford/F’burg area 95 sees an additional ~30k cars/day. There are road improvements in progress but they are too little, too late.

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