[ExI] Self-driving cars can dramatically improve traffic flow

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Experiments show that a few self-driving cars can dramatically improve
traffic flow
May 9, 2017 by Celeste Arbogast

<https://phys.org/news/2017-05-self-driving-cars-traffic.html>

Quotes:
"Our experiments show that with as few as 5 percent of vehicles being
automated and carefully controlled, we can eliminate stop-and-go waves
caused by human driving behavior," said Daniel B. Work, assistant
professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a lead
researcher in the study.

The team conducted field experiments in Tucson, Arizona, in which a
single autonomous vehicle circled a track continuously with at least
20 other human-driven cars. Under normal circumstances, human drivers
naturally create stop-and-go traffic, even in the absence of
bottlenecks, lane changes, merges or other disruptions, Work said.
This phenomenon is called the "phantom traffic jam." Researchers found
that by controlling the pace of the autonomous car in the study, they
were able to smooth out the traffic flow for all the cars.
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