TL;DR: like the dams before, highway construction is expensive and the system has reached saturation, so the momentum might yet be slowed by another coalition of environmentalists and fiscal conservatives.
Surprised the article doesn’t mention the recently published A City on Mars — a book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, of Bea Wolf and SMBC. It talks about lots of other stuff but covers this too.
TL;DR: like the dams before, highway construction is expensive and the system has reached saturation, so the momentum might yet be slowed by another coalition of environmentalists and fiscal conservatives.