However, its clear to me that individual actors in the traffic system do not behave in a way that is beneficial to considerations above and beyond their own. I do believe that this would cause some decrease in overall traffic if it was "fixed" by an automated program. (If your car can drive 200 mph and not make a mistake, doesn't that imply that you can have more traffic throughput on the road?)

Either way, I am interested if you have specific examples besides the meme of traffic being terrible in LA. I assume they have done massive studies on the problem considering how problematic it is known to be.