Ultimately people need to drive less, either because they live close to their jobs, because they use public transit or a bike, because they work from home or any other reason.

The problem is how to get people to do that. It certainly won’t be by easing congestion because that has the opposite effect. Short term gains because moving cars pollute less but long term loss because less congestion causes more traffic.

For example a light near my house recently got changed from both-ways green to green on each side sequentially.

There is a private school campus near which resulted in lots of morning traffic but after the light sequence change the traffic considerably reduced (throughout same but latency is worse) mainly because apps routed to compensate for the new light sequence.

Interesting, I’d never really thought of it but this would actually work with self-driving fleets that could take advantage of both time of day congestion charges and billing to allow the user flexibility in travel time. Hmm...