This algorithm is garbage because it puts no value upon the danger cause by other traffic changing lanes when they would not have otherwise.

You're just going to wind up being approximately the slowest person on the road, which is fine if you're constantly trying to go slower to build space but this means that a bunch of traffic that would have not gone around you will do so. This ups the danger vs a steady flow less all these lane changes because every "thing" other people do is an opportunity to do it badly.

Kinda ironic when you consider that TFA was about detecting dangerous merge situations in the data.