1) Our transportation infrastructure was built for a much smaller population. 2) covid-era flexible work trends, while nice in some ways, also have encouraged more sprawl-ish lifestyles (living further from your job) among wealthier workers, which means that commuting and mundane errands all require more driving 3) we are back to maybe 70% of pre covid # of commuters into boston daily, but t ridership is still way down, so lots of people who used to take the t are driving. When you think about just the pure math and geometry of this - take like 50 people off the t and into cars, that’s one small car on one train but 50 new cars on the road which takes up a ton of space. Multiply this by god knows how many times. Traffic is basically exponential growth. This is why the crisis at the T matters to you even if you never set foot in a bus or train in your life. 4) as others have said, flexible working hours for more people just means the congestion is “spread” over longer hours. 4A) so commuting traffic is probably basically at the same “level” as it was pre covid for working commuters, + the 30% or so still working remotely are driving around for other things (errands or whatever) when they might have been parked all day at a commuter rail stop or their office’s parking garage while at work 5) for as much as people bitch about inflation, gas prices, etc, consumer discretionary / leisure spending is still through the roof since the end of covid - more people are traveling, going out, shopping, etc, and driving more to do all of these things. And a lot of the white collar people who are especially likely to have this kind of discretionary income also have more free time thanks to flexible work arrangements.

The main thing really is the T. Especially if people are going in to the office 3x a week instead of 5, they are a lot more likely to be willing to put up with traffic 2-3x instead of 5, so the T needs to be an even better value proposition for riders than it was pre covid. Instead it is worse.