The New Yorker on the paradox of traffic. My paradox is that I must commute for work and I cannot carpool due to the necessity of a flexible schedule. I’d rather walk or take public transportation but for the moment, it’s a necessary evil. I enjoy driving, however and I delight in the freedom my car gives me on the weekend- that’s my paradox 
No major new highways have been built around New York since the nineteen-seventies, partly because there’s no room left, and partly because many people believe that building highways makes congestion worse, because drivers who had previously used mass transit to avoid the traffic begin using the new roads. Even if no new drivers take to the new roads, scientists have shown that increased road capacity alone can increase congestion, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “Braess’s paradox,” after a German mathematician named Dietrich Braess. In the twenty-three American cities that added the most new roads per person during the nineteen-nineties, traffic congestion rose by more than seventy per cent.
But not building highways also causes traffic.