“Traffic congestion is choking our cities, hurting our economy, and reducing our quality of life,” begins a new report from the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank. Rush-hour gridlock paralyzes 39,500 lane-miles of roadway each year, eating up $63 billion in lost time and fuel. But much worse is to come.

By 2030, the number of severely congested lane-miles will reach nearly 60,000 per year, an increase of more than 50 percent. Commuters in the largest metropolitan areas will spend 65 percent more time in traffic than they do now . Within 25 years, at least a dozen major cities will be choked with travel delays worse than in today’s Los Angeles, whose notorious congestion is the worst in America.

The solution is the obvious one: Build more highways, and manage them more intelligently. “The old canard ‘we can’t build our way out of congestion’ is not true,” the authors write.

They estimate that 104,000 new lane-miles will be needed by 2030, at a cost of about $21 billion a year, much of which could be raised through electronic tolling. The return on that investment would be a stunning 7.7 billion fewer hours spent in traffic each year, along with all the wealth and freedom those time savings would generate.

All this is heresy, of course, to the car-haters and PC nannies who are forever lecturing us to quit driving and use mass transit. But we are overwhelmingly a nation of drivers; the real “mass transit” is the traffic on our highways. If the highways don’t grow to keep up with that traffic, the strangulating misery of gridlock will only get worse.

I am convinced that Jacoby, like his shiksa counterpart Ann Coulter, is actually a radical leftwinger, mercilessly parodying the unyielding idiocy of the right week after week in his column. I mean, he can’t be for real.

*Originally “a fat schlub,” my fact-checker, Dani B., assures me Mr. Jacoby actually has a pretty tricky figure (see comment #2 to this post).