Yes--sort of.

When I first moved here, I found it pretty annoying that it was so difficult to get around town and that it was especially time-consuming to get downtown if you didn't live very close to downtown. Downtown also seemed a relatively empty shell that wasn't living up to its potential in part because it's so hard to access from the areas most people live. The big traffic-clogged arterials lined with endless soulless strip malls seemed worse here than anywhere else I'd lived.

In part because of the poor infrastructure here, I got interested in urban planning and have spent quite a bit of time learning about and analyzing the development of car-centric cities (like ones common in the US) and pedestrian-centric cities (like ones common in most of the rest of the world).

Springfield misses the mark on both, though. It's an incredibly car-dependent city, but the lack of access to the core of the city by car keeps downtown from thriving. At the same time, it's far too car-dependent and spread out to allow downtown to thrive organically from people who live nearby and would patronize businesses there. As well, while the region is starting to put in a little bit of bike-friendly infrastructure, the few disconnected bike trails and the existence of the Link really don't do much to promote cycling as a feasible way to get around our spread-out city.

Although I personally think that Springfield would do well to remove restrictions that currently prevent the market from filling the demand for building walkable neighborhoods (e.g. allowing denser "missing middle" housing and intermixing commercial and residential [both currently against zoning laws], removing current ordinances that require setbacks and parking minimums [which make it illegal for developers to build homes or businesses close enough together to allow people to feasibly choose to live car-free], etc.) and allowing vibrant, lively communities that don't require driving everywhere, if Springfield is going to embrace car-dependency instead, the current infrastructure really doesn't fill those needs, either.