Slowing a road down doesn't decrease its throughput (at least not until you get to very low speeds). The minimum spacing required between cars is proportional to speed.

Slowing down roads also means they are more comfortable to bike in and to walk alongside, which will move some people from cars to other modes and decrease peak traffic for drivers.

If the goal is efficient and consistent transportation, then traffic coordination is far more important than raw speed.

A fancy 10GBe switch without any flow control or collision detection is basically useless.

True but people don't have that either, regardless of speed.

> A fancy 10GBe switch without any flow control or collision detection is basically useless.

basic 10Gbit switch works far better than fancy 1Gbit switch in vast majority of cases. Only if you need single digit ms jitter while running storage loads on same switch does it start to matter.

It's also absolutely terrible comparision at every level because

* now even lower end switches can sustain max speed between every port at once, while traffic often have clear bottlenecks

* pentalty for stopping traffic (by congestion) for 10ms is 10ms delay. Stopping car traffic (with say red light) means multiple second delay till everyone gets up to speed. Even single car acting badly can make massive traffic wave slowing down people behind them for minute or more.

>pentalty for stopping traffic (by congestion) for 10ms is 10ms delay.

That's because Ethernet has flow control, while car traffic doesn't. That's why my example was about a very fast switch with no flow control or collision detection. Basically, a fast but otherwise terrible hub.

We can't solve the inherent problems of hubs by making them faster, but somehow we think it's okay to solve inherent problems of bad road design by adding more lanes or increasing speed limits.