The COVID-19 pandemic

[plam]

There's a long history of highway bypasses being linked to the decline of towns. It's probably a lot more nuanced than the highway bypass killing the town, but it's certainly not an unwarranted concern.

Route 66 & Interstates for sure. There is probably some truth to cars and even trucks helping drive some traffic into a village centre but at the same time they also make them unliveable as danbrotherston stated. And there were the experiments with pedestrian areas in the 70s which didn't work so well (e.g. Quebec City for instance; there's a whole webpage at http://www.urbanreviewstl.com/2009/11/no...rian-mall/).

I could imagine at least a truck bypass.

In NZ all of the highways go through all of the towns to a first approximation. But there's not that much traffic really.