As an American who has lived in Europe (UK and now Germany) for the last 6 years, this sort of thing now blows my mind. Mixed residential and light commercial zoning? Who cares! I have a modest grocery store just up my thoroughly residential neighborhood and it's great. My kids large-ish daycare is a 10 minute walk away and it's wonderful. We have single family homes and small apartment buildings intermixed and you wouldn't even know.
Its not about the 16 kids, its about the traffic from drops off and picks ups clogging up the streets during busy times. Unloading and loading a kid takes time.
Worst case, that's just 16 cars, twice a day. That doesn't seem like a thing to make a big stink about.
There are plenty of annoyances that come with living near other people. Putting up with a reasonable level of annoyance is an important part of having a civil society. I put up with my neighbor's bullshit and they put up with mine.
It really doesn't take that much time. On most roads you'd be hard pressed to notice 16 cars. What kind of road are they on where this would be material?
And one reason people choose daycares is because they are close. Where I live anyway many of us walk our kids to daycare.
My guess is they either don't like the woman or the idea of daycare. The car excuse is extremely flimsy.
There's between 500 and a thousand homes within a short ten minute, quarter mile walk of this daycare. There should be no traffic impacts whatsoever from this business, because nobody should be driving to drop off their kid at daycare. If their neighborhood is suffering from car traffic, then that's due to poor street design not supporting alternatives, not any single business attracting customers.
Nobody likes cars driving through their neighborhood. If these were good faith concerns, then these folks would be agitating for traffic calming measures instead of trying to quash the exact kind of business that belongs in a "residential area."
Even 16 kids doesn't sound like much of a nuisance. I guess the main objection would be to the cars dropping them off/picking them up, but that's only twice a day, and presumably some of the kids share the same parents.
It's contained in a single home which, presumably, the owners still live in. In terms of traffic, you're looking at an extra ~32 cars/day which is likely a rounding error in terms of total traffic.
I have no idea what the current parking situation looks like but daycares definitely aren't known for drawing continuous traffic.
We seriously need to get over this NIMBY problem.