Yeah the issue is that when you're giving everyone a 500 square metre suburban dream within a 20 minute drive of the beach, highways don't scale well.
Perth where I grew up is a classic case, a city of about 2 million that's one of the geographically longest on the planet, about as long as the drive from London to Bristol, with almost all the population organised sparsely and coastally, branching off one long north-south highway.
People with desk jobs being able to work from home often nowadays helps, but being required to commute into central Perth regularly from an outer suburb is an unpleasant life ... albeit one I was almost always able to avoid.
The degree of sprawl contributes to impatience and an appetite for speed in the deep suburbs of Australian cities. Thing is, that response to me is quite rational.
