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Google "induced traffic". There's a lot of transport research that goes on on academia, and its been shown that building more roads increases traffic exponentially. Obviously this applies to areas with high current concentrations of cars. If someone wants to build a 4 lane freeway in the middle of Hicksville for a kickback this may not apply, obviously...
E.g.
http://www.walkablestreets.com/wide.htm

What about those people who just don't want to live in a city?

Then their fuel bills go up, like they've been doing. Which is fine if you have the money. Just don't expect me to sympathize too much.

What bugs me is all the preachy "green" types who whine about any attempt to build housing with more than a few stories. David Owen covered the topic very well here:

NYC is the Greenest City in America

However, I think the grid's greatest enemy is it's own users. This country is too power hungry.

Move to man's natural habitat: the city.

Sorry, the facts aren't on your side. From a cursory Google search:

"By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world... The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T... New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use."

"Tall buildings have much less exposed exterior surface per square foot of interior space than smaller buildings do, and that means they present relatively less of themselves to the elements, and their small roofs absorb less heat from the sun during cooling season and radiate less heat from inside during heating season. (The beneficial effects are greater still in Manhattan, where one building often directly abuts another.)"

"Bruce Fowle, a founder of Fox & Fowle, told me, 'The Condé Nast Building contains 1.6 million square feet of floor space, and it sits on one acre of land. If you divided it into 48 one-story suburban office buildings, each averaging 33,000 square feet, and spread those one-story buildings around the countryside, and then added parking and some green space around each one, you'd end up consuming at least a 150 acres of land. And then you'd have to provide infrastructure, the highways and everything else.' Like many other buildings in Manhattan, 4 Times Square doesn't even have a parking lot, because the vast majority of the six thousand people who work inside it don't need one."

"Thinking of freeways and strip malls as 'urban' phenomena obscures the ecologically monumental difference between Phoenix and Manhattan, and fortifies the perception that population density is an environmental ill. It also prevents most people from recognizing that R.M.I.'s famous headquarters-which sits on an isolated parcel more than a hundred and eighty miles from the nearest significant public transit system-is sprawl."

As it happens, these quotes are all picked from the article "New York Is the Greenest City in America," which I highly recommend you read.

Sorry about not intuiting your nationality, I guess I was overeager to reply. But I do know for a fact that holding quality of life constant, city residents use less energy per capita--electricity plus gas--than rural residents, due to the fact that large buildings are more energy-efficient to maintain and build, again per capita, than single-family dwellings. All the statistics I've ever seen (and believe me, this field is full of statistics) confirm this observation. None contradict it. It's such a self-evident tenet of urban planning as to be a truism. I suspect you're forgetting the "per capita" part, which is key.

Moreover, this pattern applies to habitation on every continent in the world, North America or no. Where city dwellers do use more energy per capita--Freetown (Sierra Leone) vs. rural central African farm communities, for example--you'll immediately note that the discrepancy is due to that aforementioned quality of life thing. To bring the same goods and services already available in Freetown to rural Sierra Leone would take a comparatively enormous amount of energy, both in infrastructure maintenance and development. Per capita, natch.

I know I'm not explaining this very well, so here's perhaps the best explanation I've seen: "New York is the Greenest City in America." If you're interested, and you seem to be, that article will be worth the read.

• of people who commute to work, how many also own cars?
• how many natural resources went into building that car?
• how many trees were ripped up to pave (and expand) the road, reducing natural c02 reclycling
• how many square feet of parking needs to be provided for each car owned - at home, work, and other destinations such as stores and malls

Here is my favorite (non-scientific) green-city article, posted a few weeks back on \.: http://www.walkablestreets.com/manhattan.htm I don't agree with the utopian view of NYC, but it may provide an alternative way to think about cities.

Oh yeah, massively pollute. Cities have no ground to stand on.

Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use.

Move to the city, man's natural habitat.