This article is really bad. The above line is one of the worst.
People don't clog-up the freeways because they are having a good time. Nobody wants to be on them. I drive the 405 with some frequency. It's hell. I don't want to be on it. But I have to. Just like everyone else on it.
We have to be on the damn roads because of where work takes us. I have clients and contracts that require me to traverse this pathway. Others are employed by companies in the Downtown LA to Santa Monica corridor. They don't have a choice. They have to be on that hellish road. People can't just quit and move to greener pastures, at least not at scale.
Elon Musk and his quest for tunneling are now used as examples of the frustration. Well, SpaceX didn't need to be in Hawthorne. The company has, what, 7,000 employees? That general area (anything around the 405) is hell for traffic. SpaceX could have been out towards Ontario, in Mojave or farther north or south somewhere. There are no inherently magical reasons for building a company with 7,000 employees in Hawthorne other than perhaps the availability of large buildings and amicable zoning and regulatory frameworks.
Not picking on SpaceX, simply using it as an example. The problem with Los Angeles is this mass of businesses concentrated in that corridor. It attracts tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people driving in from within a 50 mile radius in every direction. This is the problem.
Tolls are not going to fix this. They would only punish folks who would have no choice but to pay-up and continue to go to work.
And carpool? Carpool is a joke. Carpool lanes only serve to waste 20 to 25% of the road's capacity. The vast majority of users are those who are not carpooling at all. For example, when we load-up the family in the car to go somewhere. In other words, no appreciable number of cars are removed from the road. Why don't people carpool? Because people are sprawled all over the place and it is utterly inconvenient. If you can find just one person who lives near you who can carpool you still lose freedom. What if you need to leave work early or go late because your kids are sick? I can't even think of one person I know who carpools.
My opinion is that LA would benefit greatly from providing tax incentives and the appropriate zoning and infrastructure support to decentralize the centers of employment. Give companies 10 years without taxes (NY state style) to either move or start-up on the outskirts of Los Angeles proper in every direction. Change traffic patterns this way and traffic will improve.
The rest will come with time. Autonomous vehicles will change the nature of traffic in potentially significant ways.
Until then it's going to suck more with each passing year until it starts to get better.