Inhabitat

I am familiar with LA and DC traffic, and in my opinion this will not work. The CAUSE of a daily traffic jam is excessive speed and diminishing space between vehicles. As the space between vehicles collapses, the speed of an event ripples faster toward the rear, causing stop and go traffic. A larger distance ensures a buffer zone enabling the event to be absorbed quickly as the line condenses and then expands again to resume normal speed.
Low level events, such as merging with traffic, would be much more intense if traffic were condensed into trains. It is hard enough to wedge in when everyone is tailgating anyway. One might argue that the space between trains should increase in order to safely stop in an event… which translates into an average spacing greater than several cars spaced out normally.
Having a train does not cause traffic to exit the highway faster, and that is usually the bottleneck that consistently causes traffic congestion.
Where the train does work, is the fact that it is driven by a professional driver, who knows to drive an average slower speed, rather than jump up to the end of the line only to stop again. Many will abandon the train because they will believe that it is simply driving too slow. Ironically those are the dummies that cause traffic to become to condensed and jam up.
We can make a considerably higher transit efficiency by simply reducing the size of cars. A half size single passenger trike car could double the use of a lane just like a motorcycle can triple it. And of course there’s always the dude riding a bicycle that seems to keep passing you by while you sit idled in traffic. (LA)

The point of the train being wirelessly controlled is to keep all the cars in the train travelling at the same speed and also stopping at the same speed. Tailgaiting is not an issue here. The events and buffers you are talking about only apply to individual drivers, not to trains. Imagine that the professional driver is controlling all eight cars in the train, this means that as soon as he steps on the brakes all 7 cars following him will also be activating their brakes without the need of the individual drivers behind him to step on the brakes physically.
Traffic happens because people speed up at a different rate and slow down at a different rate from each other and then get frustrated and decide to change lanes often, causing more people on the adjoining lanes to have to slow down and then speed up again. If there were more “trains” with professional drivers then traffic would flow more smoothly.
This concept would work with any size cars, whether small or large.

Trains and specific to road travel, buses. The advantage here is similar to the argument for ethanol and hydrogen over electric cars. People want something that is exactly like they have now (in the sense that it doesn’t limit their current capabilities), just more efficient or better for the environment. If you link up to these trains on roadways already in place you still have the benefit of parking your car at home, and getting exactly where you need to go (usually work), and you still have all the flexibility to get off at an early exit for a coffee, or go to the post office after work before heading home – things you don’t have the ease of doing if your commute involves an actual train or a bus. It’s like those trams in Logan’s Run or something. It’s a system that still goes everywhere you want to. I can see the argument that it may help traffic jams (especially if we also move to smaller vehicles), but the fuel economy bit wouldn’t be to drastic – it would be as if 7/8 of us all got much better at regulating the accelerator, good, but not an end solution to fuel economy.