Urban/suburban life seemingly has become more and more inconvenient as time has gone on. I often ponder if that’s more a change in my own mindset than it is with the actual world around me changing? Things like waiting in large lines at the store or in a big rush hour traffic jam just seem excessively draining to me now.
Life in big cities just seems to me excessively precarious. Housing drives cost of living up, while traffic congestion degrades quality of life to a degree that is often unpredictable from one day to the next but is always heavy. Frankly, DFW as the lower-congestion alternative to Sacramento strikes me as reflective of a lingering coastal mindset: living as I do in a city of 400,000 where commute time rarely exceeds 25 minutes, I would need a lot of convincing to move to Dallas.
This said, I'll be pleasantly surprised if we are able to hold on to what we have. Later this afternoon I am going to an open house for widening of the K-96 Northeast Freeway, which was built only a little over 30 years ago and is already at the point of needing six lanes.
Y'all do realize that this is proving induced demand is a thing.
Not going there! I do agree that development patterns respond to the presence of a freeway over time, and any metro area with a strong developer community is going to struggle to maintain free capacity/preserve LOS minimums over time.
Living in-city isn't the hardest thing in the world. You learn to avoid certain roads at certain hours, or switch modes entirely to bypass the jam. If I-5 looks jammed, I'll park and take the bus or train; if those look jammed, then I opt for a different way around. Downtown streets jammed? Train or rental bike.
Yup. I have done all of those (except rental bike) when visiting large cities. There is frequently a time/convenience penalty that I regard as the price of easy access to big-city amenities and not having to scrounge for car parking.
Having to go drive miles and miles to run errands is exhausting. I'm looking at potentially moving in with a friend who lives in downtown Seattle, which would put me within a short train ride or bike trip of just about anything I'd need for daily living. The one hangup is being unable to bring my car to downtown, so I'd have to find a more remote parking situation and commute to and from the car if I want to road trip, but that's certainly not a daily thing.
You live in the Seattle area, which is congested to begin with, and whose isthmus geography complicates provision of highway infrastructure. So, yes, I absolutely can believe it would be exhausting to run errands by car even if they were chained. It is different here, because of not just easier geography (no Lake Washington), but also lower overall population--the stops are closer together despite somewhat lower density of suburban development.
Both of them say traffic congestion is a deterrent to living in an area, which means once a threshold is met, demand to live in an area and for capacity of roadway actually is tampered.
Not quite. What we are saying is that congestion serves as a deterrent to people who share
our personal preferences. Such cities continue to grow (to a point well beyond what we would consider tolerable) because the US population as a whole is far more willing to perform congestion arbitrage.
When they want to move to Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo or Rochester because of their lack of traffic and available road capacity, let me know. 
I'll pass. They suffer, to greater or lesser degree, from a doughnut problem in which congestion is worse in the suburbs than in the city center, owing to the latter having experienced more economic distress. I've actually sat in standstill traffic on I-480 in metro Cleveland.
