Experiment Shows How Self-Driving Cars Can Prevent Traffic Jams

Traffic jams are one of those problems that practically everyone in the world understands. They suck, take up a lot of people’s time, and have been known to cause more than a few road rage incidents. In a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois, self-driving vehicles prove that even just a few of them could make a real difference in traffic flow.

The experiment involved inserting one self-driving vehicle in a line of 20 vehicles with human drivers behind the wheel to see what kind of effect it would have on the flow of traffic, Futurism reports. In a sense, the study is a response to the opinion that autonomous vehicles won’t have much of an effect until most of the cars on the road are self-driving.

Based on the results of the experiment, it would seem that by simply controlling its own braking routine, the self-driving car could influence how many times the human drivers step on their brakes as well. Doing this was even found to have an effect on fuel consumption, reducing it by as much as 40 percent. Daniel B. Work led the research and he pointed out in a press release that there’s no need for self-driving vehicles to become the majority to impact traffic, at all.

“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,” Work said.

On that note, it would seem that fully self-driving vehicles aren’t even necessary to cause such changes. The research results also indicate that even semi-autonomous vehicles will do. The secret to better traffic flow is simply to introduce better communications technology between vehicles, which is actually possible right now. Vehicle-to-vehicle and object-to-vehicle communication technology can be implemented easily.