This piece in The Economist points to a couple studies suggesting that adaptive cruise control, if widely deployed, could help deal with traffic jams:
Adaptive cruise control (ACC), as its name suggests, is a modified version of traditional cruise control. It employs radar to monitor the road ahead of a vehicle, automatically adjusting that vehicle's speed to maintain a safe distance from the one in front. This is safer than manual driving because it reduces the system's reaction time from nearly a second (human) to practically instantaneous (machine), thus helping to forestall shunts. But ACC may have a useful side-effect, arising from the fact that another effect of slow human reaction times is to produce traffic jams on apparently open roads.
It's an interesting example of how giving technologies (or organisms) a very small amount of intelligence can create some higher-order benefits and coordinated action.
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