Altruistic Autonomy: Beating Congestion on Shared Roads

Have you ever felt you are losing too much time in traffic? Have you ever asked why all the cars on the roads can't just all go with some constant speed? Most drivers have had such thoughts. And if you live in a large city, you may relate to this funny scene from "Office Space": In this post, we will present a mathematical model of traffic congestion and explain why it happens using this model. Afterwards, we will analyze the effects of a recently emerging and popular technology, autonomous cars, on traffic congestion. As we showed in our WAFR 2018 paper, "Altruistic Autonomy: Beating Congestion on Shared Roads", autonomous cars have the potential of significantly reducing traffic congestion!