This is exactly true. In all honesty the US should never again build a new road or highway. There is already more then enough of both. Its not even close, in fact a huge amount of road needs to be removed, just reclaimed by nature.
To give an example, the city of Indianapolis is 'commited' to maintain a road that could go from Indianapolis to Alaska. Like seriously, even if 100% of government revenue was focused on just road maintenance, this wouldn't be possible. Lots of cities have the same situation, way to much infrastructure.
Within existing limits of the bay area cities you could easily build like 2 million new houses. Without a single new road, water pipe or anything.
This talk by Peter Calthorpe (the guy who invented Transit Oriented Development) about California and the Bay Area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4
This video about his work in China is also amazing: