I beg to differ, and that's a criticism I also have for the OP:
From my humble observations, traffic jams are caused because too much traffic (x cars/sec) flows into a bottleneck, i.e. something that can't allow x cars/sec to pass through. Whenever I get into a traffic jam, I play "spot the bottleneck" to ease my boredom, and so far I haven't found a case where there was none.
Transient traffic jams like the OP described seem to get solved by people accelerating as much as they can once they're past the jam. If there's no bottleneck ahead, they're indeed transient.
From my humble observations, traffic jams are caused because too much traffic (x cars/sec) flows into a bottleneck, i.e. something that can't allow x cars/sec to pass through. Whenever I get into a traffic jam, I play "spot the bottleneck" to ease my boredom, and so far I haven't found a case where there was none.
Transient traffic jams like the OP described seem to get solved by people accelerating as much as they can once they're past the jam. If there's no bottleneck ahead, they're indeed transient.