[joestringer]

Perhaps. I would propose that the application of this paradigm to traffic flows would have each intersection making the decisions for the drivers. A car says "I'm heading to east 42nd", and the intersection says "Sure, go left."

Furthermore, traffic controller(s) would constantly gather information about traffic conditions from each intersection, and tell them how to direct the traffic to optimise road usage.

This way, the traffic controller knows everything about the optimal way traffic should flow, and it only has to make decisions based on the number of intersections rather than the number of cars. If you consider that one intersection could have tens of thousands of cars per day, that provides a huge saving in computation.

This differs from the analogy in the article; Intersection = Router, Car = Packet.