Comment by fnordpiglet
1 day ago
Actually this is untrue. The congestion improvement comes from cooperation between vehicles. Basic control theory applied to cooperative vehicles found 5% of cars participating can eliminate stop and go traffic conditions, and in general as you approach 100% penetration all traffic moves at maximum rate effectively like a self assembling mass transit system. Only if you effectively replaced human drivers as adversarial agents with AI adversarial agents would things stay the same. Even at lower levels of 30% penetration you see most congestion resolve even in urban roads.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09680...
If you built a lightrail where only 3 people could be in each section, that would be a close equivilant to driver density. At anything close to rush hour, you couldn't put enough trains on the line to keep up with demand, because trying to transport that many people, at that low density, all to the same area just doesn't work. It is so crazy to me the lengths people will go to justify car culture over walkability and public transit.