alt Hacker NewsThroughput in congestion is determined mostly by how quickly drivers react to the opportunity to move and how many points of attrition are in a path. Both of what are impacted by the number of cars and how well they break or accelerate, not by their size.
There's space to claim large car cause attrition, but that's completely dependent of the local properties of the streets.
Replies
The footprint of the car matters. When cars get 5% longer, the same number of people in cars takes 5% more roadway, which adds up quickly, because the difference between smoothly-flowing traffic and jammed traffic is a fragile equilibrium dominated by breakpoints. Furthermore, heavier cars accelerate and decelerate slower than lighter cars, which has a compounding effect on decreasing overall throughput.
That larger cars cause diminished throughput is pretty solidly demonstrated through a variety of modeling and real-world traffic analysis.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365069344_How_the_r...