“Today we are well underway to a solution of the traffic problem.”1 This claim, made by Robert Moses in 1948, is as true today as it was then. Which is to say, not at all. In the middle of the last century, the preferred solution to “the traffic problem” was more cement: new highways, bridges, and lanes. Today, the sensible solution includes more sensors and better computers: highly automated vehicles that use existing roadways and roadway networks much more efficiently.2 This automation, we are told, will make vehicular congestion a “thing of the past.”3 As in the past, however, this prediction presumes that more capacity necessarily means less congestion. Today’s transportation planners recognize that the relationship between these two concepts is much more complex.
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