Rules on that vary from state-to-state and country-to-country. In some places you're required to take the plates off, in others your required to leave them on...

Unfortunately, many of those small towns kill themselves. Towns hate having the highway go through town--it's lots of traffic and loud and obnoxious---so they campaign to get the road moved, even if it's not being upgraded.

Then the town dies.

Oops.

It's really noticable in some parts of western canada---it hasn't gone big-freeway yet, so there are still some towns with the highway through the middle of town. They seem to be doing fine. On the other hand, the ones a couple miles from the highway are hurtin'.

I recently moved to Japan and met Ito-san at the last competition here in Tokyo: he's a super nice guy, did a bunch of translating for me, introducing me to the other players and so on.

That leaves me cheering for the ANZ crowd because I lived there for four years, and the Japanese too All of the Pacific Rim underdogs.

Good luck to you and him for the rest of the week!