Or to put it another way...To congest is an active verb...we choose to congest or not.
Did someone send this commentary over to Sam Adams at PDOT? He gets it, but needs to walk the talk with more gusto.

The big challenge i see that we have is to avoid trying to solve a land use and housing choice problem with a transportation tool. As long as we continue to subsidize greenfield development (not such an issue in Oregon any longer as local governments can't provide services for existing residents much less expand capacity for new because of the strangling effects of last century's tax limitation initiatives) we will have people choosing to buy bigger houses on more land farther out and then bitching when the highway isn't big enough to ensure that their longer trips are un-congested.

This dynamic is beginning to be reversed by fiscal restraints and growing costs of fuel and car ownership. But when banks make housing loans they still count cars as assets and don't do full cost analysis of housing location choices, ignoring the higher cost of transportation for farther out housing and penalizing borrowers who would like to pay more for housing for more accessible locations.