[GigabyteCoin]

The article claims that the maximum theoretical throughput for traffic per lane is 2,400 vehicles per hour.

What if every vehicle is separated by 2 seconds of stopping time, but all vehicles are moving at the exact same speed of 200 Miles per hour?

It would take one vehicle 0.005 hours to cover a mile (5,280 feet).

Assuming each car had a length of 10 feet, it would take 0.005/528 = 0.0000095 hours for a vehicle to cover it's own length at 200 mph.

2 seconds is the equivalent of 0.0006 hours. So each vehicle would take approximately 0.0006095 hours to cross any given point.

Providing a number of 1/0.0006095 = 1,640 cars per lane per hour according to my calculations.

I expected the number of cars per lane per hour to increase with speed, which is why I did the calculations, but apparently it does not!

If you could actually drive 200 mph on your way to or from work however, you would get there sooner than you typically do in traffic. It's an odd problem to think about.

[sk5t]

Hmm? This shouldn't be surprising at all given the rather large assumption that one car passes a fixed point each two seconds. Go as fast as you like... an observer on the roadside must still wait two seconds for each car to rocket (or crawl) by. Imagine having an ethernet card that could only send one frame a second to a party on the other side of the globe: would you care if the additional network latency due to switches and the speed of light were 1msec or 200msec?

Where we may see great improvements in road throughput is in driverless cars that greatly reduce that gap.

[dclowd9901]

It'll be really interesting to see how driverless cars negotiate things like natural merges (a freeway losing a lane), and how that affects traffic flow. Ostensibly they'll be as efficient as possible, but if two lanes become one, there's going to be some slowing regardless. Furthermore, in a vehicle that also ostensibly wants to get you to your point of interest in as timely a manner as possible, how does it decide whether to subject itself to staying in a right lane where it might be subject to moreane merges, or does it ever decide to go around a particularly bad or congested spot for the sake of getting you to the destination?

[GigabyteCoin]

Yes, that seems to be the only possible metric we can reduce to increase the flow of traffic.

Cut that number in half from 2 to 1 seconds, and you would approximately double your throughput.

[tonyarkles]

I love it! It's a counterintuitive result, but if you think about it, it makes sense.