Akron, Ohio

Abstract

Akron is a city of innovation, continually reinventing itself as its economy continues to evolve. Today, we are a city of 198,000 people, with an infrastructure built for 290,000 people. So, unlike many U.S. cities, Akron’s challenge is not to build more infrastructure to accommodate more people and cars. Even with an overbuilt infrastructure, the city still has major challenges surrounding adequate and attractive transportation between downtown and its inner core neighborhoods as well as using and marketing its downtown parking options properly. Our city’s challenge is to make smarter, more efficient, and more effective use of the infrastructure that it already has, to better serve its residents, workers, and visitors. As a city whose economy was heavily based on manufacturing, a sector that has changed rapidly in the past few decades, Akron has experienced substantial population loss over the past 50 years. As such, many formerly vibrant neighborhoods have experienced increasing vacancy and abandonment. Similarly, the transportation corridors that serve these neighborhoods are overbuilt for the amount of traffic that they carry. As neighborhoods have lost homes and stores, social and economic opportunities for the remaining residents have declined along with the population. Akron has set a goal for itself of again surpassing 200,000 residents by 2020. Beyond that, the city has placed the audacious target of achieving 250,000 residents by 2050. To achieve this goal, the city must attract roughly 7% of the metropolitan statistical area’s population to the urban core. Given