Trying to remember an adage on nanog back in the day about why ISPs should provision 2x average capacity, and how traffic in the 1990s expanded to fill the bandwidth available to it. If I remember, it was about only making extra circuits available for burst traffic, and not available otherwise. At the time I remember thinking this had obvious paralells to road traffic.<p>It sounds closely related to Parkinson's Law about work expanding to fill time allotted to it (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law</a>) which links back to the OP.<p>For express traffic, I've often thought periodically tapering off passing lanes using painted lines and forcing drivers who passively drive in them back into the active flow of traffic would increase the average speed and consistency of flow for related reasons and the idea of "smooth is fast." Physical dynamic traffic shaping, essentially. Adding complexity or even randomness to interrupt the dynamics that induce the increased demand would be a design consideration.<p>I'd wonder where network protocol design ends and car traffic engineering begins, or if they are essentially the same thing.