Driving is highly elastic and among economists this is well-known and beyond serious dispute. A regularly updated review of the literature is available at https://www.vtpi.org/elasticities.pdf
Yeah I'm sorry you're being downvoted because your intuition is shared by a lot of people but is actually a pretty common fallacy (and one I believed before I started reading about transit policies a while ago now.) There's a long-tail of driving demand which is very elastic and the only reason why it exists is because the US underprices driving and builds expensive road infrastructure to lower LOS areas than most of the world. When he was a bit younger, my dad was the type to often just "go out for a drive" and drive in circles for a while just to clear his head. On its face that seems fine, like going out for a walk, but then you realize that my dad was just taking up a limited throughput resource for a very low-value use. My partner's family who actually lives close to NYC used to take drives to Manhattan "for fun" for years actually.
That's the crazy thing. Driving into lower Manhattan costs society hundreds of dollars, but to an apparently huge fraction of drivers it wasn't even worth nine lousy dollars.
Yeah I know. I was shocked when I learned my partner's family drove to Lower Manhattan "because why not?" But there just is a lot of long tail behavior like this.
