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Can we say so or it doesn't make any sense?
I want to say that there is a pressure on the city because of a great deal of cars.
Is it possible to use "overload" then?
And what's about the usage of "a great deal of" ?
"Overloaded" means you loaded too much into/onto something. You don't really 'load' a city with cars, and this sounds like some individual made a mistake when I think what you are actually trying to say is that the capacity has just been exceeded gradually over time by a constant increase in the number of cars.
I feel it would be more idiomatic to say "the city is overrun with cars", which means that it is filled beyond capacity.
Here are some other possible alternatives, but do check the definitions as some of them may by a little 'poetical' for use in a purely factual statement:
Even though the meaning is clear, I agree with other answerers that this might not be the best term to use in reference to a city.
If you are intent on using that term, I would suggest being more specific with the object that is being overloaded. In this case, the city's road infrastructure or its transportation network would be overloaded.
You will want to consider your prepositions in this case.
If I say something is overloaded by I am making a reference to whoever or whatever did the loading. For example, The train's boxcar was overloaded by the railyard workers who had loaded it. This means the railyard workers had loaded too much onto the boxcar.
If I say something is overloaded with I am making a reference to the items that have been loaded. For example, The train's boxcar was overloaded with wheat. This means too much wheat has been added to the boxcar.
In your example you are talking about a city. The parameters for a city becoming overloaded are not clearly defined and as Billy Kerr says, it doesn't quite work in your example. That being said, your example would be better understood if you said, The city was overloaded with...
It doesn't sound very natural to me, although it is understandable.
We often use "too many" to express something like this. It means "an excess of".
Examples:
The city has too many cars.
There are too many people in the room.
There are too many customers in the shop.
This is a perfectly normal, natural thing to say, at least where I am from, which is New York City. The City is often “overloaded by cars,” and that’s not at all an unusal observation to make, or way to phrase it.
It’s not the same as being overrun by cars—the cars aren’t every where per se (New York City has the lowest per-household rates of car ownership in the USA by a huge margin), or “taking over” (again, most people don’t use them) but they are in excess of the city’s capacity to handle cars (even a small fraction of NYC’s population is still a huge number of people), resulting in heavy traffic and impossible parking (my wife spent two hours looking for a spot just yesterday! my turn for that tomorrow).
Instead, the emphasis here is on capacity—the City only has so many parking spots, only so much room for traffic to move smoothly, and so on—and that is being overwhelmed. Stuff that is held against your capacity is the load on that capacity—in any kind of metric, not just weight—and in this case, we have overload. So yes, I think this is a rather ideal verb to use.
And by is a perfectly reasonable preposition to use—with would be equally fine—since the things taking up capacity are the cars. The preposition by could also refer to the people who did the loading—in this case, I guess, the drivers?—but context here would be quite clear that the cars didn’t do the loading, they are the things that have been loaded. By could work either way.
So yes, “the city can be overloaded by cars,” that’s perfectly fine.
