Traffic congestion will always be a thing. The real world is too unpredictable. You can’t pack a highway full of cars and expect them to drive highway speeds. One animal jumping on the road and you’ll have a massive accident because nobody can avoid anyone

Traffic congestion doesn’t happen because of lack of coordination. Coordination prevents collisions. Our success rate could be a lot better but the system does pretty well with coordination limited to blinking lights, a noise that says “fuck off”, the mutual knowledge that we all got the same training and the private knowledge that everyone else on the road is a suicidal idiot who slept through the training.

Congestion is a physical property of the road network. There’s a physical limit to the number of cars you can push through a road in a given time period. Drive the cars too fast and they fly off the road when it bends, or cars slam into each other when a deer tries to commit suicide.

Traffic is well modeled as an incompressible slightly non-newtownian fluid, like runny oobleck. If you apply more pressure/increase vehicle volume the fluid starts to bind up as it becomes harder for the cars to maneuver without collision, regardless of coordination.

You reduce traffic by taking cars off the road, or scheduling utilization. Self driving cars won’t help, and we can do both of those without them. Long term they’re likely to make collisions worse because humans don’t know what they’re going to do, so the primary mode we have of coordination, “the theory of mind” will break down. Right now they’re so uncommon that you assume any car is a human who reacts and prioritizes like you.

Tear down the freeways and replace them with trains.

In other words - car usage expands to the limit because human nature is to use the resource until it gets inconvenient. The gas expands to fill the container.

I won’t disagree with what you said, but I’ll disagree that it’s the same point I was making.

My point was that there isn’t a technical solution to traffic congestion. You need less fluid or a bigger pipe. What you correctly mention is why a bigger pipe won’t work for humans when it does for water.

And out of pure pedantry, I’d disagree purely because my analogy said “non-newtownian liquid” - those don’t expand. :P it’s more like a hyperactive toddler manically jamming silly putty into a PVC pipe.

I don’t believe we will ever get coordinated autonomous vehicles. You will never be able to absolutely trust the information you are getting, whether it’s because wireless sucks, auto manufacturers couldn’t agree to or properly implement a universal standard, software bugs, or malicious behavior. If we want it to be safe, then the cars will have to drive cautiously and be prepared for behavior that was not properly communicated. This will not be a form of driving that is fundamentally different to what we have now.

And even if you could implement perfect coordination between autonomous vehicles, how would you be able to take advantage of it in the real world? Ban all human drivers? What about pedestrians and bikes? You still need crossings and traffic lights for an area to be livable by humans. You still need to drive slowly next to a pavement where someone could eg trip and fall onto the road.

Ban all human drivers?

No.

What about pedestrians and bikes?

Continue avoiding them – that should never change.

You still need crossings and traffic lights for an area to be livable by humans. You still need to drive slowly next to a pavement where someone could eg trip and fall onto the road.

Agreed.

All those examples seem like they’re in response to a goal of eliminating 100% of all congestion. I actually edited my comment to clarify that that’s not what I’m talking about, but that edit was many hours before your response. Is it still unclear?

Since we’re talking examples, maybe I can offer one to clarify:

Ever been in a traffic jam after someone ran a red light or stop sign and caused a wreck? If fewer (because zero is unrealistic) of those incidents happen, then there are fewer traffic jams caused by them, right? And when they do happen, it would be easier to reroute traffic early on – which might also make it easier/faster for emergency vehicles to get to the scene.

Or for an example that is completely unrelated to traffic: Condoms and vaccines are pretty effective. Maybe not 100%, but still enough to be useful. There are some areas in real life where absolutism is just unproductive.

Ever been in a traffic jam after someone ran a red light or stop sign and caused a wreck? If fewer (because zero is unrealistic) of those incidents happen, then there are fewer traffic jams caused by them, right? And when they do happen, it would be easier to reroute traffic early on – which might also make it easier/faster for emergency vehicles to get to the scene.

Yeah, this is reasonable, but that’s just lawful driving. You mentioned “coordination” before so I understood you meant that they will be able to drive significantly faster due to the coordination. That’s what I was responding to and why I pointed out reasons that autonomous cars will still have to drive carefully even if they are coordinating perfectly among themselves…

Or for an example that is completely unrelated to traffic: Condoms and vaccines are pretty effective. Maybe not 100%, but still enough to be useful. There are some areas in real life where absolutism is just unproductive.

Here’s my concern expressed in similar vein. Imagine a vaccine that you expect to be ~5% effective in the midst of a pandemic. You might say 5% is better than nothing, but actually it might give people a false sense of security. They might change their behavior (be less careful) to the point that the end result is the same or even worse than it was before the vaccine.

If we get autonomous vehicles, it’s almost certain that they will affect the number of cars on the road. If their (hopefully) better driving leads to only marginal gains in the prevention of congestion, the future might actually be more congested than the present.

Ha ha. Traffic will move to let billionaires through quickly.

Regular folks will be stuck in endless traffic trapped in driverless cars that charge them $5 a minute for the privilege all while playing the same loud and obnoxious audio video ads on repeat for hours on end.

This should be used in some sort of dystopia-themed movie or Black Mirror episode or something, if it hasn’t been done yet