Phantom Traffic Jams

Here’s an interesting phenomenon that robotic cars could help prevent.

You’ve probably all experienced something like this before while driving. Basically you’re driving along on a crowded highway when suddenly traffic slows way down for just a minute or two and then speeds back up again. The video doesn’t go into much detail about how these things form but the basic reason is that most vehicles can slow down faster than they can speed up so if a car slows down just a little then several cars behind it need to slow down before the first car can speed up again. This builds up until cars are momentarily coming to nearly a complete stop and you end up with a mini traffic jam moving backwards along the road.