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by wbeaty 5396 days ago
Prizewinning 2004 research by LC Davis of Umich showed that stop/go traffic jams were eliminated by adding in a certain percentage of cars with Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC.) It only took a little less than 1 in 5 cars.

http://www.ur.umich.edu/0304/July19_04/19.shtml

http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Btraffic+jams+%2Bdavis+%2Ba...

What does ACC do? It imposes proper safe driving headway distance, as well as providing near-instant reaction time for braking. No tailgating, no accumulation of 1-sec human reaction times.

But couldn't human drivers do the same by simply padding out their 2-sec spacing to 3-sec? And only a few need to do it.