[revscat]

This is almost a perfect metaphor for the failings of capitalism, or at they very least the notion that the singular pursuit of selfish greed can lead to ideal outcomes. The selfish need for individual drivers to go as fast as they can leads to a collective failure, here in the form of a traffic jam.

[ctdonath]

Capitalists are generally smart enough to forego immediate gain in favor of substandard greater gains under different conditions.

Rather than drive as fast as I can in Atlanta's 8AM rush hour (and get nowhere fast in the ensuing jam), I leave for work before 6AM (with half the drive time).

[darpa_escapee]

On the other hand, quarterly profits.

[bpodgursky]

Or, if you insist on bringing politics into unrelated topics, it's a failing of a commodity that hasn't been properly marketized.

You have to externalize the cost of bad behavior by making it a proper market.

[galdosdi]

It is fun to imagine how you could set up a price structure that incentivizes the right things to prevent traffic jams.

For example:

* A small per-second fee that is inversely related to the distance between your vehicle and the vehicle in front or behind you, whichever is closer. Maybe the distance scale would be dynamic based on speed, maybe measured in "estimated stopping time", such as (just as one wild example) a certain fee for being at 100% of safe estimated minimum stopping distance, a smaller one for 200%, a higher one for 50%, negligible or no fee for more than 1000%,

* A penalty fee for changing lanes. In dense or stop and go traffic, changing lanes imposes a pretty large cost on nearby traffic, as both lanes are stopped for a bit. Grass-is-greener temptation causes many drivers to change lanes, which quickly eliminates any sought advantage, but makes traffic worse as drivers essentially take up double space.

* etc?

Then dynamically tune the fees to get the desired result. Watch as frugal drivers economize by

* avoiding tailgating and unnecessary lane changing

* (because of the "minimum of distances" rule) learn to, in denser traffic, balance their available space between front and rear neighbors.

* are loathe to go too slow without making it easier for faster traffic to pass (if you want to enforce speed limits, maybe the distance-to-rear-neighbor cost should only be enforced when travelling below the speed limit?)

* Per-second instead of per-mile fees encourage drivers to avoid already jammed areas

As for hardware -- I guess the kind of hardware needed for adaptive cruise control / lane maintenance/merge assist now found on fancier vehicles is sufficient to measure and operate this (as long as few people successfully hack their toll measurement system, which I honestly think is realistic).

[jerf]

You don't need "selfishness" to create traffic jams. You need only "latency in response"; if you response less than instantaneously to the car in front of you slowing down, and you response less than instantaneously to the car in front of you speeding up (especially if you accelerate even a bit conservatively, let alone late), you very quickly get amplifying waves.

Your post, if we're going to trade snarky political barbs, is a great example of how some people think that some magical form of "regulation" can regulate basic control theory right out of existence. Thinking that any form of regulation could somehow fix this is exactly the same as thinking that they could "fix" gravity. The physics is actually pretty simple at the core, even if the details are complicated. Anywhere you get negative feedback of a certain very, very popular and easy-to-hit form, you get waves. Can't be stopped.

[wlesieutre]

You shouldn't even want to accelerate immediately at the same rate as the car in front of you, unless you're very optimistic about 1) having instant reflexes on the brake pedal even though your foot is currently on the gas pedal, and 2) your car's stopping distance being exactly the same as every other vehicle.

Having a time delay on your acceleration means that your following distance will increase as speed does, which is the safe behavior. I've had plenty of times when I thought "woo, we're accelerating, it's the end of the traffic jam!" and then had to hit the brakes when we came around a turn into more traffic. Traffic might be reduced if we all rode everyone's bumper all time time and accelerated as a single unit, but that doesn't mean we can actually do that without tons of collisions.

[jerf]

"You shouldn't even want to accelerate immediately at the same rate as the car in front of you,... but that doesn't mean we can actually do that without tons of collisions."

That is correct. Therefore, safe driving will actually create traffic waves. It seems unlikely we'd actually want the regulations that would prevent this sort of wave!

[creeble]

I agree, but I think traffic is really more of a classic "socialism vs. individualism" problem. Tragedy of the commons and all that. I think it's a little more zero-sum than many would have you believe that capitalism is, at least when there is any reasonable amount of traffic. The actions of greedy drivers can be felt for a long way, even if it may not seem like it in the moment.