The best solution to deal with issues regarding traffic and vehicles is to enhance residents’ desire to live in suburban or countryside areas. I strongly do not agree that displacing people from cities to rural areas helps to reduce traffic problems.
First and foremost, encouraging inhabitants to live in the countryside can lead to environmental and urban sprawl issues. Life in rural areas requires high energy consumption for heating, cooling, and transport to detached suburban houses compared to apartments in cities. The high demand for forest to build farmland or for heating, for example, might be the cause of deforestation in rural areas. Moreover, cooling suburban houses directly pollutes nature and negatively affects animals’ health, and might lead to forest fires.
The second primary reason is longer commutes and increased reliance on cars. Moving people to rural areas means they need to travel a long distance to get to work, school, or city services. This can increase traffic on highways and main roads, potentially creating a new congestion problem instead of solving it. Longer commutes require a large amount of fuel, which causes air pollution by vehicle emissions. In addition, long distances cause certain negative emotions such as stress and dissatisfaction. Individuals who spend four hours to get to work, for example, would feel overwhelmed than people working near the job.
To sum up, living in rural areas is not the best solution to deal with these problems, it leads certain other issues counteracting the intended environmental benefits of reducing city traffic.