Traffic feels like an unavoidable menace. Even with a few vehicles on the road, small disturbances can create huge traffic jams out of nowhere. This is primarily our own fault: if we could all simply drive at a constant speed at a reasonable distance from other vehicles, gridlock would be far less common.

Of course, expecting humans to drive rationally is asking the impossible. But in the near future, autonomous cars could provide the answer. A self-driving car could automatically correct for our worst driving habits and smooth out the driving experience for everyone. But how many self-driving cars would we need? Would we need to replace all our human drivers with machines to save ourselves from traffic jams? Just most of them?

According to new research, our roads might only need to be as little as 5 percent robot.

A group of researchers created a computer model back in 2015 that predicted only a handful of self-driving cars could dramatically reduce traffic jams. Now that self-driving cars are a real thing two years later, the researchers got a chance to test their model out.

On a test track in Arizona, the researchers drove at least 20 cars in a circle. Normally the cars would spontaneously form a traffic jam, but when the researchers introduced a self-driving car into the mix the traffic jams didn't happen. The self-driving car was programmed to drive at an average speed and react more quickly than human drivers and could eliminate the jam.

This is good news for all of us, because a 5 percent self-driving car rate is something that could happen in the next few years. It might take decades before half of all cars are autonomous, so it's encouraging to know we won't have to wait that long before we start seeing some benefits.

Source: University of Illinois

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