I mean theoretically adding a lane or two should allow more cars to flow through, or would bad drivers still cause bottlenecks/gridlock despite the added capacity?
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Traffic can be modeled as a compressible fluid, which is one where the particles(cars) have a slight attractive force from a distance(you slowly catch up to the car in front of you), and a strong repulsive force up close(you slam on the brakes when the car in front is too close).
You can model a highway using compressed air and pipes(or have a computer pretend to do so and get the same results) of particular sizes to model as lanes on a freeway.
What’s counterintuitive about modeling traffic is that we wish it could be modeled as incompressible flow, because that would mean when a bottleneck happens, the particles/cars should *speed up*, and there would be no shockwave slowing down everyone. But that doesn’t happen because people drive how they drive.
Adding lanes will allow for more cars to travel through the same section of roadway per second/minute/hour, and this should help increase the space between cars, which means fewer people using their brakes and causing shockwaves(you can model exactly where these will happen based on the configuration of the lanes). But this isn’t considering the fact that more people will drive on the road if more cars can drive on it, and fewer people will use surface streets.
Some ways you can increase the throughput of traffic:
-add lanes, so there is more space between each car
-design your lanes such that there isn’t a massive amount of cars all trying to get off the same exit while cars entering the freeway are trying to get into the fast lanes, opposing the drivers trying to exit. This causes lots of shockwaves that otherwise wouldn’t exist if traffic designers were more intentional about their designs.
-occupy as much lane area as possible, which means staying in the disappearing lane until the merge with the adjacent lane happens(this one is counterintuitive because most drivers want to merge as soon as possible, which reduces the effective lane area that can be occupied by cars. Iirc Norway advises their new drivers to stay in the merging lane until the last second, something an American might road rage at another driver for doing)
And lastly, changing how the particles(cars) interact with each other. This means reducing following distance and reducing your reaction time. If everyone drove like the start of an f1 race, not braking until they are right on the driver in front’s ass, and accelerating as soon as the car in front begins to move, shockwaves that cause slow downs would get sucked *through* the bottleneck and would cease to exist.
Obviously the last part is super unsafe and not advisable, but it would make traffic go faster, at least until the wreck happens.
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