Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing who is doing what when. I am not a network engineer, but I cant imagine that people are driving the most efficiently to even attempt to maximize throughput.
especially when you think about the fact that a lot if not most traffic jams are ghost jams, where a slight overreaction ripples through the following cars causing them all to stop for no apparent reason.
I might have to look into this a bit more, and I would agree that adding more cars to the point of the system literally being unable to handle them cannot be optimized.
However, its clear to me that individual actors in the traffic system do not behave in a way that is beneficial to considerations above and beyond their own.
I do believe that this would cause some decrease in overall traffic if it was "fixed" by an automated program. (If your car can drive 200 mph and not make a mistake, doesn't that imply that you can have more traffic throughput on the road?)
Either way, I am interested if you have specific examples besides the meme of traffic being terrible in LA. I assume they have done massive studies on the problem considering how problematic it is known to be.
Traffic in LA is a symptom of a social interaction, where demand exceeds supply of a scarce resource. Its not a "technical" problem in the naive sense. You proposed solution is like trying to solve the "tragedy of the commons" through fertilizer. The problem of the commons is not that the quality of the commons is poor. The problem is that no matter how productive it is, it will be overgrazed. So, this is a social problem. Not a technical one in the engineering sense. The solution is ultimately solved with poltics, who keep the politically less powerful (ie, the poor) out of the commons.
