[SirSourdough]

Yes and no. If consuming the lanes as much as possible was the goal, we’d be parked bumper to bumper with no available space to move at all.

We want the throughput of the road to be as high as possible. Broadly, that means maintaining the optimal (minimum) spacing to make the merge safely without changing speed, while maximizing speed.

You may get larger areas where speeds are disrupted, but on the average be going faster. Stop-and-go traffic introduces tons of inefficiencies since drivers need to be much more cautious than in a consistent traffic flow.

The big challenge is that it’s basically impossible to know what the optimal speed is, since it relies on knowing the detailed state of the road and traffic volume miles ahead of what you can see.

Self-driving cars are interesting here since they will open up new opportunities for all the vehicles on the road to co-regulate their speed near to the optimum.