Adding self-driving cars to the road might actually make traffic worse because human drivers will start 'bullying' the robots.
April 13, 2026
Original Paper
The Impact of Cut-ins on Mixed-Autonomy Traffic Flow: Bridging Microscopic Game-Theoretic Model and Macroscopic Flow Analysis
SSRN · 6561869
The Takeaway
Humans quickly realize that autonomous vehicles are programmed to be ultra-safe and risk-averse. By cutting them off and driving aggressively, human drivers create a 'critical instability' that slows everyone down more than if no AI were present at all.
From the abstract
The transition to automated transportation introduces mixed-autonomy traffic where human drivers may strategically exploit the risk-averse behavior of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs). While microscopic models capture these dyadic interactions, their aggregate impact on network-level stability remains unquantified due to the scale gap between agent-based and continuum models. This study bridges this analytical divide by integrating a game-theoretic friction term directly into the macrosco