As driverless cars take over more and more, the weird (aka dangerous) behaviors should become less common. Many forms of distracted driving will simply vanish, not even considering the obvious issues like drunk driving.
Once you start automating dispatch, I think it simplifies and improves things further. For one, you're going to be less likely to be late.. which means less stress/anxiety and less distractions which should mean less accidents and near-accidents that cause traffic issues.
IF you can eliminate many - but unlikely all - of the little issues, problems, etc that compound to cause big problems, why would there be traffic jams?
(And that's not considering traffic updates to re-route around existing problems.)
My offhand anecdata suggests that the bulk of traffic jams are caused by people driving older cars. There is a little-understood cosmic force that causes cars to stop running in proportion to how critical the section of roadway is to regional transportation and in proportion to the age of the car. 1985 Nissan Sentra in a tunnel? Guaranteed to burst into flames.
More seriously, there are obvious reasons why older cars are more likely to just stop running, or to be involved in a fatal accident that snarls traffic. I think the tipping point is not going to come from the deployment of self-driving cars, but will arrive instead when the fleet of junkers nears eradication.
It's not obvious to me why older cars are more likely to be in fatal accidents. Even though my '66 Mustang is wildly less safe in many ways, it also gets driven with much more care than what I see around me.
There's probably a bathtub-shapes curve of driver care. I'm sure that drivers of classic American sports cars, at this distance from their dates of manufacture, are taking due caution. People with new cars all have ABS, stability control, and the other bells and whistles. But people who are driving the 1994 Dodge Colt were probably forced into it by financial circumstances. They don't have an investment to protect, they don't have any safety features, and they probably don't even have working shock absorbers or roadworthy tires.
I don't know if I am alone in this perception, but it has been built up over many years of being stuck in traffic on the Bay Bridge. What kinds of cars to you see on fire, on the shoulder, or being pushed off the bridge by those Caltrans wreckers? Old ones. Second-hand cop cars bought at auction. Old Japanese compact pickups with 2 tons of concrete in the beds. Cars that were going 75 MPH on emergency spare tires. Cars with no outside mirrors? WTF?
I ride the bus, so I'm biased. I think if your car breaks down or you get into an accident on the Bay Bridge you should pay a million-dollar fine and have your car and license seized permanently.
Do you mean they push wrecked cars down the length of the bridge to get them off? Or are they literally in such a rush that they just chuck it off the side of the bridge? Because that would be awesome.
On top of that, the cars can communicate more and faster than the drivers, and can be programmed to collaborate with the other vehicles. So you can have stuff like the cars in a packed highway opening up a diagonal for a car in the left lane to take an exit on the right.
I feel that will work only okay even if there is one car manufacturer, but get tthe differences between a lot of them, then throw in porsche and others programming in "advantages" and "agressive" as options and where do you end up?
I'm just thinking about the level of coordination required and then you get into timings, and other issues where one car may respond slightly slower. I think stuff like this makes it way harder than people think. And that's without any bad or just not altruistic actors there. Think if the "Sport" package on your BMW was code for "talks the other cars into letting it go first.
With peoples car, the person with the complete clunker wins that race as they obviously don't care if they hit you and don't have the money to pay you back. BMW has to back off.
With software it's down to the negotiating powers of the cars software.
We've seen how well that works in trading, no one ever games the laws slightly for their own advantage.
As driverless cars take over more and more, the weird (aka dangerous) behaviors should become less common. Many forms of distracted driving will simply vanish, not even considering the obvious issues like drunk driving.
Once you start automating dispatch, I think it simplifies and improves things further. For one, you're going to be less likely to be late.. which means less stress/anxiety and less distractions which should mean less accidents and near-accidents that cause traffic issues.
IF you can eliminate many - but unlikely all - of the little issues, problems, etc that compound to cause big problems, why would there be traffic jams?
(And that's not considering traffic updates to re-route around existing problems.)
My post on the topic: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/future-transportation-today