Yeah, totally. At least that's one way to look at it. There are multiple right answers. Lowering driving rates helps, flexible work hours helps, increasing public transportation helps. Any of these would diffuse traffic jams, and no there's no one single problem and no one single solution -- unless nobody drove at all.

But that's why building tunnels doesn't seem like the best first-line defense. It's expensive, and it's fixed and inflexible, and doesn't reduce demand. It could help, but it could also hurt unless tunnels are less expensive to build & maintain than roads.

I was trying to be playfully sarcastic by saying the problem with traffic is traffic. Most larger cities in the US, there's only a traffic congestion problem during rush hour, accidents, and road construction. (The city I live in does enough road construction every year, enough that it's widely considered to be a top contributing factor to traffic congestion.)

LA traffic, which is what the article referred to, is worse than that, it's density is getting high enough that traffic congestion lasts all day in some places, rush hour is not just slow but crushing, and accidents can and do routinely prevent tens of thousands of people from working. It does seem like there must be a large economic cost to LA's traffic.

Yeah, pursuing a culture shift that discourages pointlessly-standardized working hours and encourages remote work when possible might even have a tangible effect on traffic.

That said traffic is often one of those unfortunate predator-prey type dynamics, where congestion being reduced often encourages more folks to drive until the system returns to an (unfortunate) equilibrium...