Yes. The 1989 Sioux City Iowa crash utilized the skills of one Dennis Fitch who happened to be a DC-10 flight instructor who was among the passengers. That’s the one that first came to mind, it’s possible there have been others.
All these bulldozers that are pushing cars to the sides of the roads-Where are they coming from, and who is operating them? Those people left that aren’t panicking and/or taking care of their families are already trying to take up the slack at their own workplaces.
All these plans that depend on others being trained and filling in have the same basic flaw. We don’t have the people to fill in because they are already at jobs that are desperately short of people, and the thought that they would abandon the job they already have and are trained for is ludicrous.
Food inspectors are already in short supply-cut their numbers in half and food poisoning is going to skyrocket. The same for safety inspectors, Quality Control and the like. The court system is going to collapse because of all the lawsuits and skyrocketing crime putting an unbearable burden on a system cut in half staff wise.
One psychological effect that occurs to me – pretty much every human conflict from petty incivility to great-power saber rattling will be exacerbated by the ever-present thought “why the hell is that asshole still alive when my lover/friend/hero/etc is gone?”
The half of the road maintenance dozer drivers who *didn’t *vanish?
“their own workplace”, for some of them, is driving dozers on road maintenance crews.
But you’ve also cut in half the number of producers they need to inspect, more-or-less, especially with staff consolidation.
Why would there still be business-as-usual for the courts system? Something drastic like half the people vanishing is a good case for Martial Law, IMO.
Why are people assuming there wouldn’t be drastic social changes to handle the short-term problems? All this talk of “rent” seems a little, I don’t know, shortsighted or something similar.
What about the trucks that have crashed into bridge supports or driven off overpasses to the street below?
Planes crashed into neighborhoods may be a bit of a cleanup effort.
Moving the people who are looting the trucks may also prove to be difficult.
If none of them vanished it wouldn’t be near enough to do the work in a week, let alone a day.
If the cars are all just stopped, sure.
As that is unlikely, and it is more likely that the cars are crashed into each other, into the walls, off of overpasses, into bridge supports, as well as just off the road.
And it is not just cars, there are going to be survivors in there as well. Children who had their mother disappear at the wheel, parents who had their kids disappear in the backseat, and cars with no one disappearing, but still trapped a the bottom of a multi car pileup.
Just start indiscriminately bulldozing cars off the road, and you are going to be killing a whole lot of people.
I’m concerned about the other knock-on effect of the sudden mysterious disappearance of half of humanity - nuclear war; the impulse to blame the disappearance of a large portion of your own nation on that other nation you’ve always suspected (sure, they claim that they’ve lost population too, but who believes them!) would be great.
Cleaning everything up will take time. But in cities, especially, cars won’t be going that fast and when the driver vanishes no one is pushing down on the accelerator. The car will crash into the curb or another car at relatively low speeds, and I’d think that a lot of the abandoned cars will be driveable. Freeways would be tougher, but a lot will smash into guard rails or wind up in fields or woods off the shoulder.
One more thing no one has brought up. Adoption agencies will be doing a land office business. There will be lots of kids with no parents, and lots of parents who will have lost one or all of their kids. It is possible that parents will reject other kids, but it is also possible that having someone to take care of will help them cope.
And some will hit head on.
I’d be very concerned about fires in a city. Between traffic issues, and other logistical problems of trying to gather together your remaining people, fire is going to spread uncontained.
That gets a bit awkward if the heroes belatedly save the day, and bring back the missing half, without reversing the time or anything.
Some kids like their new families more than their old, some parents like their new kids more than their old ones…
Some parents come back to find that their kids died in the backseat of the car when they went and disappeared on them.
We’re just talking about clearing the main freeways/essential roads here, right? Not making sure each and every car is neatly pushed to one side in every suburb.
And I’m not the one who said it would just take a day - a few days, more like.
Jesus! No-one’s talking about the bulldozing as a first step, you can stop with the “What about the children!” crap. Just saying it’s way easier to bulldoze than restart and drive each car blocking essential routes.
In my area the sheriff department has keys to several heavy equipment lots in the county and deputies who know how to use them. It came in handy immediately after Katrina. Such things are planned for.
Civilization does not depend on food inspectors and lawyers. We’ll get by.
If the two lawyers in a town become one lawyer, things might improve. 
Interesting about the sheriff being able to get to heavy equipment. Makes a lot of sense.
Basic survival does not depend on food inspectors and lawyers
Civilization does depend on a safe food supply and a fair legal system.
This is possible, certainly in the very near aftermath when everyone is panicking.
But the reality of the disappearance probably wouldn’t support it for very long.
No nation has the technical capability to make this happen, and satellite surveillance would quickly confirm that it was worldwide. Sure, there will be conspiracy theories. Plenty of them. But the facts on the ground don’t remotely support “some enemy nation did this”, so it’s unlikely to be the predominant explanation.
War doesn’t always have the patience to wait for the predominant explanation.
Unless you blame Wakanda.
So, pre-FDA America (and all those countries with rigged justice systems?) Not civilized?