I am skeptical of claims that autonomous vehicles would decrease congestion even without taking into account this paradox (i.e., even if the density of cars on the road remained the same). All the claims seem to reference the same study [1], but per the abstract they are just simulating one circular lane of traffic. No "lane changes, bottlenecks, merges, or changes in grade". Intuitively, it seems like once you add all these other factors in, autonomous vehicles won't help much unless deployed on a wide scale; for example, it doesn't seem like one driver can do much to speed up the merging of cars ahead of it.
The original post even mentions that it’s if deployed on a wide enough scale. The point is that f it is, it will end traffic. I haven’t seen any arguments that address what they’re talking about it here in this thread so far.
Will it though? Lyft claims that self driving cars are smoother and more consistent. They claim this will end traffic. Smoother, consistent driving doesn’t take into account traffic lights, stop signs, merging, lane changing and turning, all of which require you to slow down, even for a bit, and all of which are sources of traffic congestion. And of course bottlenecks as you move from a highway to city streets, and the slowing down as you reach your final destination. Intuitively, you would need a vast, high capacity tunnel network that would allow you to avoid all those things to “end” traffic (maybe). That’s more than self driving cars alone.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01693