>>>>Observed that many times in the Chesapeake bridge/tunnel. And in the tunnel there aren't any line changes, it's a stiff white line all the way. It's just that some rookie is driving there for the first time and got shit scared of driving under water. In the summer it may be crawling at 40kmh or less; in the winter, 90-100kmh is the norm. Somehow, this affects both lanes simultaneously.
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>>It's a truism that where there are no on- or off-ramps, traffic flowing slower than the limit has no useful justification and is to the disadvantage of everybody. Yet it's accepted as normal by thousands of commuters. How will everybody feel if it's confirmed that the same handful of commuters reliably provokes it every day? ;-)
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>>Worse is the speed up-slow down waves that can result in nose to tail crashes if a single driver is over- or under-attentive.
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>>Self-driven vehicles may not be perfect, but they should be able to reduce these patterns.
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>Even driving at the limit can get you a criminal charges: http://www.drivers.com/article/149/

And right there it says "We humans are not that clever at devising rules to cover all situations at all times, and sticking strictly to the rules, as unions have found out, is a good way to bring a system to its knees.". So... how's software different from a set of rules, except by the rules being enforced automatically, by the machine?

To put it in more simple terms: if the speed limit on a stretch of a road is 100, and you're surrounded with dozens of cars doing 115, what is the software supposed to decide?

And, BTW, the thing that unions have found out - the earliest I remember was the swiss custom officers' strike. Being uniformed state employees I think they didn't really have a right to strike, so they resorted to actually doing their work by the book instead. IOW, they did the full procedure on every passenger, fully respecting all the rules. The queues were just about ten times worse than if there were only 10% of them, in normal mode of operation.