What're incentives for state to care about traffic? In my city they'd close road, do nothing for a month, then quickly patch in a few days and open road. They don't care about traffic jams and badly patched road requires repair every few years, which is a good thing for repair company, they always got a lot of work.
Theoretically I understand that bad traffic results in bad economy and less taxes, but in reality those things are so far away from each other to not make any influence.
The government decided to dig a third tunnel in one case because they calculated the economic damage would be greater if they had to close one tunnel for several years than digging the 3rd. Also this 3rd tunnel will not be used after construction other than for emergency evacuation. The 3rd tunnel was only approved under condition that capacity will not be increased.
Either your local officials are incompetent, or the problems at hand are much more complicated than you're giving them credit for.
When it comes to locals, they are much more apt to be voted out by not repairing potholes, then state/national levels where people tend to vote on party lines.
But, back to your road issues, I'm guessing you missed the part where some underlying infrastructure has gone bad, water and sewer pipes the most common culprits were fixed. If traffic were allowed to drive over the problematic pipes it would have made the issue much worse much faster leading to the entire street getting dug up.
Theoretically I understand that bad traffic results in bad economy and less taxes, but in reality those things are so far away from each other to not make any influence.