When you go to driverless cars you can have higher traffic volumes on the road before you have to slow down. However the fundamental mathematical fact behind car jams is that you can pass more cars/second at high speed than at low. So if you have a road running near capacity at high speed and anything goes wrong, then you get a car jam that by necessity must travel backwards and grow in the process.
During peak commute hours, the volume of people who want to be on the road exceeds their capacity. As long as this remains the case, we'll continue to have car jams.
The idea is that automated driving, when it's good enough, increases road capacity enough that jams no longer occur. Capacity improves because all cars are now able to go much faster and with smaller distances between them, and without constant mistakes slowing other cars down.
Jams are like a constant. If there are no jams, people can live further and further from their places of work and play without paying commute penalties, so they'll buy larger properties further and further out, until the congestion from the extra commuting becomes an issue again.
The problem is that when you increase capacity, and decrease flow problems, you increase demand for that capacity. I find it very hard to believe that you can increase capacity enough to avoid jams in cities like Los Angeles.
Ok, interesting business opportunity, time-based road pricing auctions integrated with automation. The roads keep flowing because people will pay others to defer their travel.
This is my thought, too. I think self-driving cars are extremely cool, but I think that a lot .
Once self-driving cars are "the new normal", they'll be a lot more comfortable than regular cars. Which means that a lot of people won't think twice about a 75-minute car commute, because with internet access and the ability to read and an extremely comfortable chair, it won't be unpleasant to do so. And we will (because our reaction time is slow compared to a computer's) be able to raise the speed limits once self-driving cars are the norm: 150 mph highways where human-driven cars are banned, just as you can't take a bicycle on 65-mph highway. None of this is inherently bad, but I hope we won't be burning hydrocarbons to do it.
When you go to driverless cars you can have higher traffic volumes on the road before you have to slow down. However the fundamental mathematical fact behind car jams is that you can pass more cars/second at high speed than at low. So if you have a road running near capacity at high speed and anything goes wrong, then you get a car jam that by necessity must travel backwards and grow in the process.
During peak commute hours, the volume of people who want to be on the road exceeds their capacity. As long as this remains the case, we'll continue to have car jams.