yeah the roads in the centre were really just used by slow moving buses for the most part and some taxis, the city centre might look a bit nicer now, but its economic performance has been downhill for many years as out of town shopping centres and online takes over, and it has also served to make it unfriendly to the disabled.
The bigger problem though is that really the city as proven with the late virus stories, has bigger problems to spend money on instead of laying some slabs in the city centre. I just find this bizarre.