That's not true in many parts of the country. It's very much a mixed bag. Look at San Antonio, 410 goes around the city and connects the various highways so you don't need to go through the city center to drive past the city. In Seattle, 405 was intended to do that for Seattle to avoid 15, but then Bellevue got huge. In SLC, we have 215.

Beltroutes are common across the country and are designed to solve exactly this problem.

Stroads are a different problem unconnected to highways going through cities. In fact, they're often the old highways that went through town and became a stroad when the highway was built. We then built more of them because people liked driving cars to their destination instead of walking or taking transit.

The best possible bypass won't solve the stroad problem or congestion in the city center. What we need is a complete redesign of what a city center means, which I think should be:

• exits for a city only at the edges, and no reasonable way to cut through the city
• tons of free parking at the edge of cities and cheap or free transit from the edge to the city center
• fantastic mass transit inside of cities
• car free zone in downtown, so the only way to get there is transit or walking/cycling

If we can do that, we can rip out stroads to make room for more density in attractions. Keep some roads for trucks to make deliveries and whatnot, and convert the rest to walkable streets.