http://amasci.com/amateur/traffic/trafexp.html: an interesting, layman-accessible approach to traffic jams, discussing their emergent nature and strategies for “busting” them.
Rather than repeatedly rushing ahead with everyone else, only to come to a halt, I decided to try to move at the average speed of the traffic. I let a huge gap open up ahead of me, and timed things so I was arriving at the next “stop-wave” just as the last red brakelights were turning off ahead of me.
It might be fun to write a simulation, with a configurable parameter for “percentage of drivers that drive like this”.