this analysi simply ignores the upside. you say that both miles driven and human time wasted are metrics we dont want to increase, but people are clearly willing to trade them off. You say people should live near work, but at what cost?
In practice, they are public funds so it ends up being a public decision. Do people support spending $X so that Y people can obtain Z preference.
I'm off to my 1 hr commute right now, which I chose because it is preferable to my housing options near work. You couln't pay me enough to live in a condo downtown. I wish transportation infrastructure was even better so that I could live further and this is where I would like my taxes directed.
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.
To clarify, I'm not dogmatic about Transportation methods, at least for work commuting. I would love if cheap mass transit took some load off of local roads and the highway system so that they could be more effectively used for tasks besides commutes.
I mostly wanted to highlight that there's a trade off of preferences at play. Using your terms, Urban living is also a misery for many people. If you want to talk about Misery, listen to some Millennials and Zoomers that feel priced out of ever owning a home or starting a family.
It seems like most of these induced demand arguments I see start from the conclusion they want (dense Urban living) and reverse engineers a justification.
As you point out, High speed rail also induces Transportation demand.
It's not that increasing highway bandwidth doesn't work (it does). This doesn't preclude the idea that alternatives solutions or a hybrid can't be more efficient.
The fact of the matter is, roads and highways required a lot of space for use and storing vehicles. Space that would otherwise go to homes or supporting mass transit or other more desirable infrastructure and uses, part of the puzzle why owning homes are so expensive but of course, not the only reason why.
In practice, they are public funds so it ends up being a public decision. Do people support spending $X so that Y people can obtain Z preference.
I'm off to my 1 hr commute right now, which I chose because it is preferable to my housing options near work. You couln't pay me enough to live in a condo downtown. I wish transportation infrastructure was even better so that I could live further and this is where I would like my taxes directed.