© Charles Chandler

 

The entrance ramps to freeways will have to be fitted with gates that will open to let cars through until the "car density" on the highway gets near the critical threshold. Then the gates will close, and will only open as the "car density" relaxes. As a result, commuters will have to wait for 5 or 10 minutes until allowed onto the highway, but then they'll be able to travel at full speed to their exit, instead of creeping along at 5~10 mph. And they will quickly realize that they're getting to their destinations a lot faster this way.

 

To make things fair for everybody, all of the entrance ramps to a freeway will have to be centrally controlled, and the number of cars entering the freeway at each ramp will have to be balanced. If we only let cars onto the highway until the threshold was reached, and then closed all of the entrance ramps further down the road until all of that traffic had moved through, then everybody would create traffic jams on the secondary roads attempting to get on the highway before the closures, and we wouldn't be any better off.

 

It might also make sense to throttle the access to the highway depending on the congestion on the secondary roads.