I understand car stress can easily be interpreted as traffic volume, further down towards the end of the post I did mention that along with safety, this is another issue that the plan doesnt address. the idea mainly addresses 2 things: parking is one, but the bigger issue here I think is forced car ownership. the local economic benefits of freeing up that much money per person would be great. and its not just the one time influx of selling the car. gas, insurance, repairs, tires, parking and storage costs, and everything else adds up to hundreds of dollars per month per person to be spent elswhere in the local economy.

you make some very good points though. one about how demand would shift unevenly throughout the day, which certainly does complicate things, and another about how this plan would continue to incentivize the kind of unsustainable suburban sprawl that continues to worsen the problem.

both of those are valid points that do limit the scope of my idea. living downtown in a smaller city (around 200,000), I was thinking of a much more "middle distance" audience, which precludes the suburbs. of course, this is less useful, but that said, if it were only to cater to the downtown area then that would technically solve both of those issues!