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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More lanes don’t ease congestion. There’s two main reasons, and one of them is indeed bottle necks. Even if you do widen a road, unless you widen each and every road, or at least most of the roads that connect to it, you will create bottlenecks that will back up into the widened road. The second reason is the fact that if you widen a road, people will assume it will be less congested, but then that just means more people will elect to use that road, and the extra capacity quickly fills up.
Lastly, bad drivers can indeed create congestions and you’d be surprised just easy it is. 5-6 cars with dumb drivers can easily block an entire boulevard or highway, if they stagger themselves just right across the lanes, which for some reason people unwittingly do very often.
The only way to truly solve traffic is to enhance public transportation infrastructure and maximise its efficiency along with roads, but that’s a utopian scenario because that’s often not possible to retroactively do on existing cities that were not built with it in mind and often costs or transit times ultimately push people away. What cities do instead is try to penalise car usage without offering a better alternative which ends up with everything just being a huge mess and transit costs rising across the board.
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