> Many of the things people want to build are pointless! Lanes are added but commute times don’t drop.

this feels like an incomplete metric to me. if you value getting from point A to point B in 30 minutes, surely other people do too. so you add another lane. now instead of 10000 people making that trip every day, 15000 do. even if the transit time doesn’t decrease (or goes up by a couple percent), that new lane still adds net value?

sure, if adding a lane doesn’t decrease transit time nor increase trips, it’s hard to make the case that it’s an improvement. but you gotta look at both of these things before you make that claim.