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This is an easy one.
I'm usually skeptical of media reporting of research results. This one sounded particularly sketchy so I hunted down the actual paper. Unsurprisingly, the article completely misrepresented the original paper.
The original paper is a simulation of PEDESTRIAN traffic, a tiny aspect of pedestrian traffic at that. The paper clearly acknowledged the difference between pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Findings of the original paper has zero applicability to vehicle traffic. The paper simulates people walking towards each other. If no one steps out of the way, a collision occurs, causing a "jam." The "people" in the simulation are given probabilities of stepping to the left or right. The rule abiding people always step to the right. The rule breakers has a 50% chance of stepping to the right or left. The conclusion is that the absolute minimum risk of jam occurs when a crowd has some rule breakers.
So, this clearly has nothing to do with traffic on our roads unless you live in a city where everyone plays chicken with their cars. This is a case of an author glancing over an abstract, picking up an interesting idea like: "a small number of rule breakers reduce traffic jams" and writing a BS article around that sentence. The author clearly didn't read the actual paper AT ALL. If she just read the introduction, her totally false and out of context article wouldn't exist.
This is irresponsible journalism to say the least.
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