Springfield was not laid out with that in mind. It was not laid out with the idea of large traffic flow in and out of the city center ever being needed, but rather used bypasses to get heavy traffic around and past town.

Now is that a good idea? In hindsight probably not. At the time those choices were made? I mean who knows. A city's road layout is a cumulation of countless choices by a LOT of different planners and interests over generations.

But the real question is, if we all agree it's a problem, and will likely only become more of a problem as the population grows, then we have to ask....what do we do about it?

The only think you really can do is imminent domain probably tens of millions of dollars worth of property in the areas you'd need to put a new major thoroughfare in, get the budget to build such a thing in addition to those imminent domain costs, and then have the city deal with the extra congestion during the like 4-8 years it would take for such a project to be completed.

Maybe that is what needs to happen, take national and chestnut and expand them into major thoroughfares with offramps instead of lights. Sure, sounds great probably, but it would obviously be an immensely costly and painful process.

And of course no matter how good of an idea it may be, you'd have hundreds of people in the community, and on threads just like this one, talking about how the city doesn't' care about people and this is a terrible idea and they are destroying historic neighborhoods and they should all lose their jobs so on so forth. I mean we can hardly put in a beaver themed gas station in a spot no one lives at without pissing off half the town.