Thanks for the reply.
You have a 1 hour commmute because the good house you can afford is about 1 hour away. I would propose that if we (all taxpayers) added 6 more lanes to the road you drive to work, your commute would dip for a short while, more people just like you would move to the new suburbs beyond yours, that are now an (improved for them) 1 hour commute, eventually re-saturating the new wider road. Now your commute is, best case, the same, maybe a little worse, because if it gets better, more people will squeeze into your suburb. You also have the option to move even farther out, but your commute will on average always be roughly as bad as it is today because people in your situation tolerate about that level of 'misery.' (Again that's how i conceptualize the variable, not saying you're literally miserable).
Yes, I suppose stimulating another splash of suburbs out in the countryside does provide Y more people an opportunity to become long-distance commuters, but I'd say:
Surely there's some limit, right? You wouldn't say that California should bulldoze neighborhoods in all the closer suburbs in order to make I-80 30 lanes wide as it gets closer to the Bay, so that people can commute from new suburbs built 150 miles away... right? And if there's some limit to reasonable highway size, why not the current size. And if we want to further increase capacity to bring in humans to a city, build a bullet train and bring them in in a way that's more efficient than individual 6,000 pound SUVs for each commuter. That's where I'd direct incremental transportation dollars. That, or subsidize commercial development nearer population centers so that people who live 2 hours from the city have other options.