I'm actually not against road construction, especially freeway construction in Southern Ontario, but we have to
a) build alternatives such as regional rail in lockstep with our road construction
and
b) we have to plan our freeways differently.
With respect to (b), I prefer the European method of building multiple narrow (4-lane) freways with limited entrances and exits - say every 5 to 10 km, and keeping surface roads relatively small. By contrast, the North American model is to build one giant 10-lane behemoth with an exit evert 2 km that empties out onto a 6-lane arterial surface road. The European model allows for speed (because there are more freeways to choose from), while concentrating development in nodes around the exits. The North American model crams all traffic - local or through-traffic - onto the giant freeway and then disperses development in our characteristic sprawl across vast acreages along the arterial roads.
I google mapped these two metropolitan areas of about 1 million for comparison.
Greater Mannheim has multiple autobahns running north south, but if you zoom in closer, you'll see that they largely run through corn fields with dense villages and industrial parks clustered around each distant exit.
Calgary has only one freeway oriented in the primary north-south direction of development, but numerous giant roadways that lead out of its frequent exits. The city is basically one amorphous mass of sprawl.