This is exactly and completely wrong.
It is very widely and passionately believed to be true; and some people are prepared to engage in lethal violence because of this false belief; but that doesn't make it true. You can say the same of Islam.
Leaving a decent gap - sufficient for others to merge in front of you - in crawling freeway traffic, actually increases the throughput of the road; it only takes a minority of drivers doing this to have a significant effect.
http://www.smartmotorist.com/traffic-and-safety-guideline/traffic-jams.html
Uh, it should increase throughput on the road. It may if drivers are rational. They're not. They're emotional bags of shit.
My brain hurts when I think of freeways as fluids. When I do I always get wrapped around turbulence of pipe diameter change as analogies for exchanges entries and exits.
I prefer to use a spring analogy, better, a digital simulated spring analogy.
First freeways are built wrong in most places since design gives way to cost most always. There are too many cars on LA freeways on the west side of the village. Attempts to stagger work schedules has been tried again and again without much success. The last one that actually worked was in 1984 for the Olympics. What worked was not the plan. It was the fact that people just left town in late July and early August freeing up the freeways to levels they'd not be since the early sixties.
I'm not saying the article is wrong. It is, but I'm not saying that.
I'll put my experience against that of the author any time because I drive, er, drove, the busiest freeway system in the world 50 miles each way every business day for over 30 years. It comes down to whether people act rationally at times of stress when they are tired or beaten down. So instead of watching the freeways flow, which I did, I concentrated on individual behavior behind the wheel. Its amazing how many people act out to and from work in their cars.
Do not expect rational behavior as the norm in rush hour traffic. Even a noisy model produces more slowing than gain when abnormal behavior takes place.
The second reason I suspect the article is the statement of 35 mph as freeway rush hour traffic when one acts rationally. Not going to happen on I 10 , I 405, US 101, I 605, I 710, I 5, or I 210 active alternatives for my drive from Woodland Hills to Long Beach and back. Wit the packing we find on these freeways its purely fiction to presume spring bouncy behavior. Instead we get progressive compression behavior and turbulence behavior. If you teach, don't teach what he wrote. Teach what you experience over about three months on LA freeways.