So self driving car brands are currently in the process of offering subscription based self driving features.
Soon these subscriptions will be cheap enough for everybody to abandon public transport and get into their self driving cars instead.
This means that everybody will be in their cars and it will create the biggest traffic jam in human history!
And finally, self-driving cars will be totally safe and able to drive completely unsupervised! While standing still in traffic going an average of 5 km/h…
It will be beautiful (/s)
Traffic is massively impacted by people breaking after ending up too close to another vehicle. There are great demonstration videos in the late 90s / early 2000s demonstrating this. I don’t anticipate me stating this fact to gain any support, because, you know, Lemmy says AI bad no matter what.
You’re right: when traffic is at its critical density, that’s often what triggers the shift from the free-flow regime to the congested regime. But just because you make computers drive the cars – even assuming they did it perfectly without randomly braking, which they don’t – that doesn’t mean it eliminates that flipping between regimes. At best, it might get you a little bit more capacity before hitting that critical threshold, but eventually it’s still going to, and then something – a squirrel darting into the road, a sunbeam glinting off something the wrong way and momentarily confusing the AI, a bump that disturbs the car just enough to make it slow down a fraction of a MPH, etc. – is going to trigger that shift to the congested regime anyway.