Again, not true, you fundamentally misunderstand the majority of car trips.

If my job is 2 hours away because there is no motorway, I will get a different job. If there is a motorway, making the commute 40mins, I will take that job.

People care how long the journey is, not how far the journey is.

People live by commute time, not commute distance. Same for service areas, if the roads all have low speed limits you would need more drivers, they wouldn't just drive for longer.

Personally when facing decision between highways, local roads and other means of transportation I almost always have a specific destination in mind. Accidents per mile is the statistic I want.

Accidents per hour of driving would be more useful for public policymakers – given fixed average commute 1 hour per day, what's the tradeoffs of building highways (worker mobility, commerce, pollution, landscape, accidents).

Out of curiosity, if the motorway is shut down due to an accident or construction, would you drive for 40 minutes and then pull over to the side of the road and work from there?