I've taken your example and I simply projected the results of an increase.
Where is the strawman argument?
The strawman is in that you focused on the example (traffic) rather than the core of the argument (blocksize and L2).
If you think that once we built twice as many highways and roads we will have twice the traffic you can show us from where we will get those numbers.
If we make three new highways between Ney York and Philadelphia will they all 3 be congested the same as the current roads while the rest keeping the same?
Sorry, but yours is one, not mine!
The exaggeration is exactly in your argument, that somehow twice as many poeple will be on the roads just because there are more roads.
Absurdities aside though, induced demand is a well known and well studied real world phenomenon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demandThere may be short term relief, but in the long term you're generally not much better off than before, congestion wise.
The tricky part is finding the sweet spot in terms of blocksize with the added challenge that increasing blocksize is pretty much a one-way street.
Since now we have around 10-20% maximum spare capacity before fees spiking and another maybe 10-20% till making even opening an LN channel too pricy, for the fun of it saying that one user opens and closes only a channel a year, can you let me know in what century will the entire population of the earth manage to get in? Oh, let's drop just to that of Europe because obviously there is a catch in that!
I have a feeling that sweet spot is nowhere near 1 or 4 Mb.
In the long term Channel Factories should significantly alleviate this part of the problem:
https://wiki.ion.radar.tech/tech/research/channel-factoryI'm not arguing that increasing the blocksize in the future should be completely dismissed, I'm just saying that linear scaling alone won't be enough.
Point being, if you increase the blocksize limit to a value that makes on-chain transactions just as cheap as LN transactions then no one's going to use LN. Why should they? There's nothing to gain except a warm fuzzy feeling that you kept the blockchain just a bit smaller. The tricky part is finding the sweet spot in terms of blocksize with the added challenge that increasing blocksize is pretty much a one-way street.
Bitcoin Cash already did that, however because their userbase is nowhere near as large as ours, we can't properly compare our average transaction fee to theirs. Theirs is about $0.01 USD or a penny - but we can't compare this to our $5 $6 $7 because the BCH network doesn't have a comparable transaction volume.
It's also hard to compare due to the difference in exchange rate. As of
right now 1 sat/b is viable with Bitcoin as well, albeit you might have to wait a few blocks. Around 10 sat/b should guarantuee placement in the next block which is only relatively expensive because Bitcoin itself got so expensive.
That's the thing with "people going elsewhere" though, I'm not quite sure where they supposedly went. Because they sure didn't go for Bitcoin Cash and its hard forks. Ethereum, maybe, but in terms of fees they aren't looking so hot right now either. Admittedly there's alts that I personally prefer for moving assets between exchanges, however at least to me they are completely interchangeable with any other alt and nothing I'd hold over the long term.