The video that the above animation is from [1] is about how bad (or alternatively, "selfish") driving behaviors where individuals inch up as close to the car in front of them as quickly as possible (only to have to slam on their brakes) actually lead to worse and slower traffic than if everyone just left a buffer of space in front of them and drove at a moderate pace.
So it's actually a lot more analogous than you'd think.
While I do love that video, it has some massive oversights:
- Safety margins requires distance to increase with velocity. i.e. if the light turns green and everyone accelerates together, then you end up with a bunch of cars going at high speeds bumper-to-bumper. This would be clearly undesirable even if everyone could press the gas pedal at the same time. Meaning you'd still want to insert a delay between cars regardless of people's ability to press the gas pedal at the same time. Heck, even with self-driving cars, you'd still want comparable safety margins in case something goes wrong; it's not like self-driving cars result in a perfectly predictable world.
- "Stay the same distance apart from the car behind you and in front of you" ignores the fact that the car behind you might be quite far behind you (if there at all). In reality you probably want to maintain a minimum distance both in front of and behind you, not an identical distance.
- It also fails to show that decongesting a traffic jam by deliberately slowing down (which is what you'd have to do to increase your distance from the car in front of you) will actually result in you getting to your destination more quickly. It's certainly not intuitive for that to be the case.
While I'm not claiming the conclusions would be necessarily wrong if you take these into account, for a viewer that hasn't already done research in this area, it sure doesn't convince them that the conclusions are correct once these are accounted for either.
So it's actually a lot more analogous than you'd think.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE