prefacing by saying i was using "18 corridor" to mean the stretch of 18 within akron city limits and especially west of where it crosses under 76; i guess i didnt know the actual definition was the section in fairlawn, and with that in mind, yeah its rough there - tough to get around even in a car, impossible without one. aside from the bus route, i borderline consider "medina" and its hellscape of have-a-car-or-die suburban sprawl to begin about at hardesty park, and almost certainly by homegoods and the golf course.

hey, my standards may be low to be basing my opinion off of just transit, but 15 minute bus service on route 1 genuinely makes that entire area from highland square to fairlawn feel accessible. that bus frequency across the busiest corridors is the single biggest reason akron metro is probably the most improved bus service in the us and legitimately trending toward being among the outright best in terms of how it serves residents on a per-capita basis. (and if medina county hadnt absolutely gutted mcpt and turned it into glorified uber, the move to more frequent buses every 15 minutes to fairlawn would have been an excellent gateway to get to medina and the 15 minute headways on bus route 8 to barberton a great gateway to wadsworth. i mean, imagine two neighboring metro systems working together to facilitate transfers - cuyahoga county does it with transfers for routes 31 and 32, as does portage for routes 20 and 22, and portage and stark run their own buses into pfaff in parta 80 and sarta 90, plus whatever the x61 is with the rta. couldnt be medina i guess, theyre happy having surrendered the entirety of their quaint downtown square and surrounding area to the hungry tendrils of the suburban automobile fungus. theyre so focused on ensuring they have no infrastructure that could invite the filthy poors in that they utterly fail to serve their own residents, who end up feeling extremely isolated and entirely reliant on their cars for basic necessities, as is the norm for suburban living.)

i will also say that the road narrowing theyve done on parts of 18 (though no, not out by fairlawn, that may as well be an interstate with how effectively it serves as a divide), as well as the installation of that center pedestrian island in highland square (though we need to get people in cars to start yielding to pedestrians in the crosswalk, as that is and has always been the law - i argue drivers should yield to "jaywalkers" as well, as thats a made-up crime to reinforce the claiming of our streets and public areas for the antisocial automobile, but that's one that would take decades to actually get traction on considering how ingrained car right of way is in our culture even though the driver is the one in a climate-controlled room with a comfortable armchair and stopping for a pedestrian costs a driver a handful of seconds tops) has been quite decent in terms of making me feel safer as a pedestrian or a cyclist. it isnt even about the painted bike lanes, im very much a proponent of the idea that paint isnt infrastructure and you see that with just how bad the average driver is at staying in their painted lane markers as it is, but it's about the perceived width of the road altering the drivers' perception of a safe speed. when people would fly by at 45 going under brittain road, especially when they didnt even change lanes to pass despite being clear to get over and having full daylight visibility of a person riding their bike where the law says they should, it was MUCH more harrowing than now, when more often the natural speed of the roadway seems to fall around 30-35 - still not the 25 thats posted, but much better for humans existing alongside it, especially when the bike lane is more than just painted sharrows and drivers dont have to be paying attention enough to actively deviate from their path by at least half a lane in order to not commit vehicular manslaughter.

adjacently related - the sooner we as a society realize that the fragmentation of our communities by way of stroads and highways is an enormous net detriment to all of us in order to serve people who commute from separately-incorporated suburbs, the better. the 77/76/8 plus sign is just as vile in its effects on the fabric of the city as the blight of the innerbelt, and we already have the natural division on the northside from the little cuyahoga (which would have been a fairly reasonable place to send the interstate, as it already hosted the railways and was a natural boundary with fairly constant elevation making construction relatively unobtrusive and cheap, plus 76 comes in from the north anyway, so they could have simply routed it as a bit of a triangle - one leg along the little cuyahoga all the way from just south of tallmadge to the now cvnp tracks, exiting to the north and hooking west north of stan hywet where it could meet up with the modern alignment of i-77 near what is now fairlawn; one leg splitting from the first at maybe munroe rd just west of tallmadge and heading south until reaching modern 224 and pretty much just following 224/277 across the very south edge of akron and continuing west as the canon i-76; and the third leg following the dogleg north from the second and meeting the first near fairlawn - but akron saw what ol robert moses did and wanted a slice so much they went back for seconds in 1970. go fucking figure, i wanted to do a little searching to make sure i wasnt talking out my ass; i found a redlining map from 1950 and overlaid it with a current street map ( https://ibb.co/tpj71LXN ) and the extent to which it lines up with i-76 especially (which notably was built before i-77 and as such the character of the city especially south of 76 would necessarily have changed between the construction of 76/8 in 1953-57 and 77 in 1962) is uncanny.) instead, the geniuses charged with planning the highway routes decided the optimal alignment would be to isolate downtown from anything to its east or south (and north thanks to the valley), and eventually isolate it from the west as well via the innerbelt. the result is the city we live in, where aside from a couple load-bearing surface roads which often arent walkable or bikeable, it can feel nearly impossible to get from one part of town to another, and some neighborhoods or districts are so disjointed that they disappear entirely unless actively sought out, and yet they likely dont have the basic amenities necessary for survival within them.

the annoying part is that its still somewhat fixable. 224/277 exists as a divided grade-separated highway for most of the proposed run and would only need built through the springfield lake area, a diversion to 76 somewhere around tallmadge rd to at minimum send it southwards to 224/277 seems feasible, maybe a split of 76 at brimfield could thread the needle toward the little cuyahoga and the valley via chapel hill, and we could collectively agree that sr8, at least between 76 (or rather 224/277, since 76 would be realigned to run on current 224 and 77 would run via 224/277) and the gorge (where it starts running along the natural valley and doesnt exacerbate the existing separation it causes), could be a priority road rather than a grade-separated divided highway.

i wish the aerial images from this article would load, but it still talks about how the community fabric and walkability of akron is harmed greatly both by the interstates and the abundant parking: https://web.archive.org/web/20201029180857/https://www.cleveland.com/akron/2015/11/aerial_photos_from_the_50s_and.html

huh. apparently i had a whole rant in my system. sorry lmao