An MIT professor says he's got a cure for some types of traffic jams.

Some traffic jams, like those caused by accidents or road work, are unavoidable.

Others, like phantom jams – often caused by something as simple as a driver applying their brakes too suddenly - are largely preventable if someone could just figure out a safe way to keep people off the brake pedal.

Well, that person could well be Berthold Horn, a professor at MIT.

He says that adding sensors to multiple cars could do the trick.

By allowing the car to interpret the rates of movement of vehicles around it, the auto could self-regulate and altogether avoid the need for sudden braking.

Less sudden braking means fewer people responding to it and before you know it, phantom jams everywhere are being avoided.

Some cars are already mostly equipped to do the job, says Horn.

Higher end cars equipped with adaptive cruise control have front sensors with the capability of assessing and responding to the traffic flow ahead of the vehicle.

Simply adding a sensor to the back of it could make it ready to do its part in the war against non-moving traffic.

A potential lower cost option is installing a pair of cameras and syncing them so they can spark an appropriate response.