[wbeaty]

The papers I've seen on this conclude that rear-end accidents are the major issue. Smoothing the waves can eliminate immense rush-hour delays, if this eliminates panic-braking that can cause minor daily accidents. Or as they say, "speed differentials are dangerous." In I-70 Colorado they claim that police pace-cars used to smooth out the fluctuations have cut the accident rate in half.

In theory the waves can represent a bottleneck, since the close-packed regions are low-flow, but the wide empty regions are also low-flow. If the smoothed wave results in traffic flowing at 35-40MPH, then smoothing will increase the flow, since the peak flow rate takes place at 35-40 MPH. But the increase isn't enormous. I think they said ~15%. That's nothing, when compared to the effects of removing an accident scene from a rush-hour commute.

You can play with those online JAVA simulators: set up unstable conditions on the ring-road, watch the initial flow, then after traffic-waves develop, watch the flow again. If enormous waves appear, the flow drops by ~25%, but if a string of small waves appear, the decrease is less than 10%.