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Unless you run into public goods dilemmas. I am not an expert on traffic patterns, but it seems at least theoretically plausible that at a certain level of crowding, adding a marginal car to the existing traffic might decrease total throughput. Ie, if each car within a certain area reduces the speed of all other cars on the road by 1% (multiplicatively), then once you have more than 100 cars in that area, each new car will reduce the total throughput (speed x cars) by more than it adds, and it would be optimal to have only 100 cars at a time.
It sure seems like this is the case in a lot of crowded cities, where cars are stuck in traffic jams and barely moving a lot of the time, such that half as many cars could go way more than twice as fast.
I will note that this does not necessarily justify this approach. It is icky and orwellian and an abuse of power. But if it would work it'll be important to recognize that and oppose it on other grounds.
This is true, but then in that case people would naturally stop driving past a certain point unless they otherwise can't avoid it (e.g. tradesmen). It's not like if you let it go unchecked, cars will keep coming until the road is so jam-packed it's always filled, all the time.
That is what happens in rush hour; though, economists call it induced demand. It's a classic example of a market failure and something that should ideally be regulated away.
I don't really think that the theory of induced demand in traffic holds any water. As someone here (I forget who, so unfortunately I can't credit them) put it recently: in any other context, if building more capacity led to that supply being consumed as well, we wouldn't go "oh no, induced demand, let's stop here". We would say "holy cow, that's awesome - let's build even more capacity".
It's not impossible that traffic is a unique and special snowflake where normal human behavior doesn't apply, cats and dogs live together, etc. But I doubt that's the case.
The issue with traffic is that more traffic causes more traffic. Freeways are like giant walls running through cities making walking and cycling hard. Car infrastructure takes an absurd amount of space making walking and cycling more difficult. Driving makes every other method of transport far more dangerous. Many parents drive their kids to school because it is too dangerous to walk and the danger is other parents driving their kid to school because it is too dangerous to walk. A person in Houston can't really choose a low car lifestyle in the same way that a person in Barcelona can. Not having a car in a city with a lot of cars really sucks, not having a car in a city with few cars is just convenience.
Public transit works best when transporting relatively large amounts of people relatively short distances. Urban sprawl is absolutely awful for public transit with vast distances and few people in walking distance of each stop. Cars make public transit worse.
Cars only benefit the person in them while slowing everyone else down and making the city worse for everyone else. Car based cities are a giant prisoner's dilemma and the best way to handle the situation is therefore a collective reduction in car usage.
This better than this
Is walking an alternative in the second place? Would you let an 8 year old ride a bike to school through the area in the second photo?
Indeed, the Vine Street Expressway cuts Philadelphia in half, preventing travel across it on the North-South streets.
Oh, wait, no it doesn't, because of a neat application of 3D technology called the "overpass", the streets cross the expressway.
Imagine needing enormous amounts of concrete to allow people to walk 20 meters. Overpasses absolutely help, but more people will walk if their outside looks like this. Those overpasses were stuffed with large cars, would you let an 8-year-old walk home from school alone there?
Would Philadelphia look like that if it didn't have a freeway?
It would probably be built like cities were built before cars, which is much more similar to the pic.
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