Context: i am in Europe so might be irrelevant to US.
I was thinking : we already have a usable solution to traffic jams. It’s called parking lots, as the ones in airports. You drop your car, then you take public transport to go anywhere. So imagine doing the same, but on daily basis. Build many such parking spots outside of the city , irrigate with public transport, make the price reasonable for daily usage (fuck you Charles de Gaulle Airport and your 14€/day fee). Boom, reduces your traffic by X% every morning.
As someone who drives regularly from Reims to Paris, I d be glad if such option existed, so I wouldn’t have to drive on Périphérique.
The two reasons I think it’s not used is “planning” and “politicians”. The latter isn’t good at former.
The fun part about that is how we in the US haven’t learned that lesson. We’re still building massive park and ride systems that see very little use in many places, but we’d rather fail big (and expensively) than actually reduce traffic.
To make Park and Ride be more effective it needs to be paired with fast, high frequency public transit (and/or great biking infrastructure), then make it very painful to driver the car into the city. Reduce speeds, narrow out lanes, remove in city parking, remove free parking, put in speed bumps, prioritize pedestrians. Basically make it suck to use your dangerous, ecologically destructive noise machine where people should be instead of cars. Otherwise people just skip the overhead of the Park and Ride to drive into the downtown area anyway.