Metrics that don't measure

The Economist ran a long piece explaining what America ought to do to shape up. Included in the mix was a long rant about "infrastructure", and the lack of "investment" (read spending) upon it. To prove the need for more infrastructure they show a graph of commute times for various countries around the world. The US is nearly the worst with an average commute time of 43 minutes.
Trouble is, commute time is a measure of how long we are willing to commute, not of the quality of the roads. When job seeking, the jobs are located in a circle centered up on your house. The longer you are willing to commute, the bigger that circle, and the more jobs contained therein. Improve the roads, and we can commute farther in the time we are willing to spend commuting. So we tend to find jobs farther from home and the commute time stays the same.
We don't need or want more roads. Boston, which suffers as much from rush hour traffic as anywhere, defeated an attempt to add two superhighways into the center of town. The state highway people tried to run I95 right into, and thru, the downtown. This occurred back in the 1980's. The folk whose homes would have been taken to build I95 rallied politically and defeated the construction plan. Boston, left with two ring highways, and four divided highways into the center of town, has all the road the land and the people will bear.
The famous Boston "Big Dig" merely buried the unsightly elevated central expressway in a tunnel. The fabulously expensive project did nothing to improve automobile access, it merely freed up some very nice downtown real estate that used to have the expressway standing upon it.
We don't need any more "investment" in new highways, we have all the road we can stand.