A Buttery Pastry posted:

You keep calling it "a quirk of human psychology", but isn't it basically just down to sub-optimal communication? Which is where self-driving cars come in, since they can communicate in a manner that would allow them to act in unison to solve traffic jams or to prevent them from forming in the first place. In any case, in regards to the topic of how great an efficiency gain you can get from that, you still have to take people into account as you move into less and less car dominated environments. If a pedestrian can step into the street at any point, then you're not going to be able to have the cars just tearing through the streets at high speeds, you'll have to settle for the cars distributing themselves in more efficient manner.