Btukfyl

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.