I don't disagree that it's overhyped, it's just the most recognizable example for me to mention. > reducing the burden on the bottleneck. That's it, nothing m

I don't disagree that it's overhyped, it's just the most recognizable example for me to mention. > reducing the burden on the bottleneck. That's it, nothing more. That's precisely it though. By reducing the burden of the bottleneck on the greater traffic network, it localizes the congestion to a smaller area and reduces the disruption the rest of the traffic network has to feel. Overall improving congestion, even if locally the congestion still occurs. > What the zipper merge is really good at isn't improving flow, it is improving space efficiency. This is based on the human execution of a zipper merge. Ideally, the continuing lane of traffic will be going at a consistent speed with enough space between vehicles to allow the merging traffic to merge without causing a disruption in the flow of traffic. Theoretically you'd get this benefit from merging earlier as well, but as you mentioned the space efficiency causes cascading impacts to other aspects of the traffic network. That being said, I only mentioned that as a recognizable example. However, a lot of congestion isn't due to a specific trigger such as a lane ending. It's due to bad human driving habits, and suboptimal human reactions to that behavior. Which create phantom traffic jams[1][2]. Self-driving cars will drive more consistently than human drivers, introducing a level of calm in a sea of inconsistent human reactions. Effectively buffering traffic in a way that will improve overall traffic flow, even before we have majority adoption of self-driving cars. [1] http://topyaps.com/how-traffic-jams-are-created http://topyaps.com/how-traffic-jams-are-created [2] http://imgur.com/gallery/CIhYAiv http://imgur.com/gallery/CIhYAiv