While it is interesting that there is "no overtaking" in the ant world, I don't think this really has any real bearing on humans and driving congestion (as suggested by the articles subheading). Having sat in long, single lane stop and go traffic I can anecdotally suggest it's irrelevant.
More importantly, there is a big difference between personal locomotion and commanding a vehicle. For example, the difference between my walking pace and that of an Olympic champion sprinter is not THAT great. However, the difference between my freeway merge speed and that of my mom is an order of magnitude. Add in fixed and inflexible travel lanes, the ability to speed up and slow down consciously and unconsciously, traveling at speeds that will knowingly cause death in the event of a problem, etc. and you have a lot more variance with higher stakes to the participants.
I'm not saying it isn't a fascinating bit of trivia, but I think Tom Vanderbilt's book "Traffic" is apt to lead to more insight than this particular nugget of knowledge.
The real difference is that stopping distance for an ant is a fraction of an ant length, but for a car it's several car lengths. So for cars, most of the space is following distance For ants, most of the space is ants. Car density decreases as the square of speed, while ant density is constant. That's not because they have better algorithms but because they're in a different realm of physics.
I agree with you about a major difference between us on motorways and anits is the variance in our speed compared to that of an ants, which I presume all travel at roughly the same speed.
Interestingly, in the UK (and probably lots of other places) we have average speed cameras at road works which limit people to 50mph pretty effectively, this results in everyone travelling the same speed with no overtaking. Anecdotally I've found this to work quite well at keeping the traffic moving.
More importantly, there is a big difference between personal locomotion and commanding a vehicle. For example, the difference between my walking pace and that of an Olympic champion sprinter is not THAT great. However, the difference between my freeway merge speed and that of my mom is an order of magnitude. Add in fixed and inflexible travel lanes, the ability to speed up and slow down consciously and unconsciously, traveling at speeds that will knowingly cause death in the event of a problem, etc. and you have a lot more variance with higher stakes to the participants.
I'm not saying it isn't a fascinating bit of trivia, but I think Tom Vanderbilt's book "Traffic" is apt to lead to more insight than this particular nugget of knowledge.