Jtdcftul

So here's the deal: my story takes place in modern America in the aftermath of an unexplained event where a runic magic system was introduced to humanity by an unknown entity. Every week a new rune is given to everyone on Earth over the age of 13, and everyone can keep any six of their choosing before having to give one up to make room for the next week's rune. Each rune represents a supernatural power the bearer is capable of using.

One of the biggest difficulties of adapting society to this new paradigm is that there's no way anyone can tell what new power everyone's going to get next Saturday at 12:00 PM EST. Mounting concerns about potential unpredictable consequences of future runes, and mounting distrust of the motives of the unknown entity providing the powers, eventually prompt governments to start safeguarding against potential accidents. And the American government decides that it wants everyone off of the roads and on the ground during an hour long period every week, from 11:15AM to 12:15PM EST, to make sure that if something unexpected and dangerous arrives on the rune pipeline one week, it doesn't result in massive, deadly, infrastructure-crippling pileups on all major roadways.

The additional Doylist reason for this is because by the end of the first book, one of these runes will cause total societal collapse by disabling all technology that runs on electricity, and the main villain's plan ultimately makes this last way longer than one week, thereby plunging the setting into post-apocalyptic territory. And for various storyline reasons, I want the roads to still be usable, and I don't want to have to wait until massive organized efforts to get the useless cars off of highways can happen before I can do these things.

But my main issue is that I don't know for certain if such a law would be constitutional, passable, feasible, or even enforceable in practice. Would it be?

Would there be any fundamental issues I'd have to address in order to justify an hour-long period on Saturdays when everyone has to keep their vehicles parked and off of the roads and all planes are grounded?

Transport networks act as the lifeblood of modern societies, and just like the human circulation system, it's a lot harder to stop and restart these networks than you might think. To explain why, let's start with planes.

At any given time around the world, there's around 9,000 or more planes carrying over a million people in the air. Grounding them all was seriously considered as a Y2k mitigation strategy until people realised that;

1) There wasn't enough hangar space to go around

2) Restarting the network of flights with their connections et al was going to be a nightmare

During 9/11, the USA did actually ground planes, and it caused chaos. Admittedly, part of this was the suddenness of the grounding, but planes were parked on aprons, runways, wherever they could fit. Ultimately, planes cost a lot of money and the businesses that buy them know that the best use of this massive capital investment is having them in the air as much as possible, earning them money. As such, airports and other supporting infrastructure are built around the idea of getting them up and getting them down as efficiently as possible, not on storage.

It can be done when needed however, and the 9/11 example shows that. Whether or not it could be done regularly is another matter. It's not so much getting all those planes back in the air at once that is even the biggest issue; it's the scheduling that makes sure that connections still work without massive layovers in one airport or another.

Similarly, with trucks in particular, this is going to be more of an issue than you might realise. Most large cities are entirely dependent on trucks to be bringing in food and essential supplies on a constant basis. Large cities consume massive amounts of food, but produce almost none. Could a city survive with an hour's outage once a week? Perhaps, but some industries are time dependent and in the hour bracket you describe, the one that I see bearing the bulk of the impact would be the dairy industry.

Cows are milked every day, no exceptions. They have to be to ensure their milk keeps being let down. That means, trucks come to each farm, every day, to pick the milk up. Depending on how far away the processing plant is, it's possible in some instances that the trucks might not make the plant before the driving ban kicks in. Can the farms hold the milk for an afternoon pickup once a week? Perhaps, but at least in some cases this would involve upgrading infrastructure to support that through better refrigeration. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it would certainly have to be planned for.

I don't think your core problem is legal; good leaders would be able to explain the risks and then set up the driving and flying 'curfew' with relatively little fuss. Pilots in particular are not going to risk being in the air during an event that could impair their flying skills.

I think the biggest issue you'll face is actually logistics. Trucks can park on the side of the road for an hour, planes can't. Schedules, deliveries and connections need to be planned around the regular shutdown, meaning that you need better sophistication in your planning of where trucks and planes are at the point of grounding. The economic impacts are certainly there, but relatively minor, especially when people get used to it. What would happen however is people with logistical planning skills could start asking for a lot more money.

Of course, the other consideration here that needs to be managed is whether there is any military exemption. If the US has enemies in your book, 11:59 am on a Saturday sounds like a great time to launch a sneak attack...

I don't think it would be possible to enforce

Some scenarios to consider

• People in just generally remote areas where there wouldn't be anyone to enforce the rule


• Safety. I may not want to leave my car if I am driving through an unsavory neighborhood


• Its an entire hour, Why do I want to be next to my car or just sit there for an hour when its going to be almost impossible for you to make me stop (You would need a lot of police officers walking around the streets but its harder in residential areas).


• There might not be enough parking in certain areas (e.g. shopping malls) due to weekend activities being concentrated in those areas. There will be a ton of congestion after an hour when people need to return to their cars and some people might not since they just went off shopping.


• Plane Flights, especially international long distance flights would have timing issues. No flights would be able to arrive on a Saturday afternoon as they would need to be operating through your closure time and no morning flights would be allowed to leave since they would also operate though the closure time.


• Short distances. If I only need to drive 5 or 10 minutes, I could just ignore the rule because its such a short distance and the perceived danger is extremely low. Sort of like Drunk driving.

Yes, it is trivially done. In fact the power to impose a nation-wide curfew, once a week for an hour, is granted by one of the runes in the hands of the members of the cabinet.

We can even say that it is in possession of the President, to make things easier. It was the first rune that this character received, and they are very fond of it.

Legally, the government of a country can do pretty much as it pleases as long as it can defend its decisions in a constitutional court and what manner of parliament is available.

In the US, an executive order by the president becomes law unless and until successfully overturned by congress or the supreme court for example. So the president, assuming he is confident of his position being upheld, could simply issue an executive order and presto, your ban on road and air travel is now in place.

Of course after that you get to the point of enforcement and practicality.
As others have already pointed out, such a ban would be highly impractical for several reasons, as well as next to impossible to enforce, certainly without a lot more police resources than the USA has available (and you'd have to exclude the police from that same ban for them to be able to enforce it too of course).

That'd stand as a temporary solution. Next a law would have to be drafted and work its way through congress without being modified by committees in such a way that it's unrecognisable from the original proposal in order to make it a permanent thing. That might be even harder than enforcing the ban in the first place.

And of course it'd have to be done quickly before someone finds a partisan judge opposed to the president who overturns the executive order not because of what it says but because of who issued it (yes, this happens a lot the last couple of years, it's not uncommon). Of course this judge can then be overruled again by a higher court, until finally the US Supreme Court decides.

In the end, a constitutional amendment would be needed to make it really permanent (or as permanent as any law can be), which is a very long drawn out process.

And even after that's enacted, the problem with enforcement still remains as big as ever.

So could it be legal? Yes. But practical? Not really.

Now, a longer ban than an hour might work.
Take for example the ban on operating commercial vehicles on a sunday that was in place in Germany for decades. That worked as every trucker knew about it and would seek a parking lot or just go home for the day. Saturday afternoon and evening every single truckstop in Germany and near the borders in neighbouring countries would fill up to capacity with trucks, many of them relying on the business in their restaurants and shops for the income the truckers provided over the weekend to make a profit.
As all or most shops are closed on sundays in Germany and indeed saturday afternoons, as are most other companies, there was no real need to have deliveries on sunday anyway. As more and more companies started operating sunday shifts, the pressure to allow trucking on sundays increased and eventually the ban was lifted.

Which teaches a lesson: such a ban is best enacted in combination with changes to society that remove the need or desire to travel during that interval.

I didn't even bother reading the entire question. The answer is no.

Ours is a society born in discontent, christened in rebellion, and ordained to test boundaries. If our national bird weren't the Bald Eagle it would be a specific vulgar hand gesture. We can't pay for enough traffic enforcement officers to keep people from dying from the idiocy of alcohol abuse — and yet you want 300 million people to stop driving for an hour each week (in a country, the western half of which sees driving as a birthright).

Ignoring the people who have legitimate reasons to travel at that time ("I'm having the baby NOW!") you'll have untold thousands driving everywhere from city streets to desert dirt roads and flying drones of all sizes — every one of them bearing Confederate flags — just to prove you really can't hire enough police to stop them.

And that's the problem. You really can't hire enough police to stop them and Americans have proven for 200+ years that we honking don't care how dangerous it is. In fact, we tend to have an irrational desire for it to be deeply on the dangerous side. There's a reason there have been eight Fast and Furious movies.

I just read TimB2's answer. Go vote for it. That one hour a week would see an absolute crime wave as evey looter in the country would know emergency services can't roll. It would be like a 60-minute Purge followed by the biggest run on security cameras you've ever seen. Living in a big city would be a nightmare.

How to make the shutdown legal is irrelevant.

From a narrative stand point I see no major issues with this. Governments can impose curfews and transportation restrictions as they please. With such drastic change tho surely comes civil unrest.

Human populations especially us citizens of the US do not take kindly to disruption in our daily routine of any kind. If the people are not given a proper explanation for the need of the curfew/Transportation restriction then you almost certainly will have rebel militias sprouting like wildfire trying to combat restriction placed on them, for reasons ranging from distrust of any government actions to simple frustrations with the inconvenience of the mandatory auto mobile shutdown.

As some side notes you may need to include information about the boom of public transportation during such shut downs.

I can for see a possible final conflict between the central government, and rapidly growing militia groups. This could result in massive loss for two sides who are essentially fighting for the same goal of public safety.

So to close your original question yes, an enforced hour on Saturdays void of automobiles is feasible, but likely to cause future problems.