Having just finished reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer (which I found through NJB videos), I have noticed a weird trend when driving in regional areas within my state of Victoria, Australia. Apart from the one highway that connects Melbourne to Sydney (the Hume Hwy), all other regional highways seem to have been converted to stroads as the towns along the highway have grown. Chuck made the distinction between roads being high speed connections between destinations whilst streets being slow-speed, dense places designed for people to engage in economic activity rather than primarily designed for throughput of cars.

Highways are intended to be roads connecting the towns, but because they have historically gone through towns, they have been upgraded to stroads over time to cope with the higher volumes of traffic. However, this has made regional driving worse as the increasing number of traffic lights, roundabouts and intersections slow down what has traditionally been a "road" whilst making town centres less pleasant to be in as a pedestrian.

Therefore, do you think there is a role in Strong Towns urban design of completely separating these highways from the towns (i.e. constructing bypasses) and converting them to fully-fledged motorways with grade separated ramps to access the towns? Then, the towns could focus on making their main street more walkable without pressure to accommodate the vast amount of traffic that goes through the town.