Twinsburg officials are drafting a long-term vision for downtown that could eventually turn Church Street into a one-way corridor lined with wider sidewalks, landscaping and space for food trucks and festivals — but no construction has been approved, and the city has not yet completed a formal traffic study on what that one-way switch would mean for nearby residential streets like Maple Drive.
The draft guidelines, which cover East Aurora Road, Darrow Road, Church Street and Ravenna Road, emerged from a $96,350 professional services contract the Twinsburg City Council authorized with Environmental Design Group in August 2025 under Resolution 74-2025, according to City Council meeting minutes. As Cleveland.com reports, the city hired the firm to develop a comprehensive downtown vision rather than continuing to make piecemeal improvements street by street.
The Twinsburg Planning Commission discussed the proposed guidelines during a special work session last Monday, raising questions about traffic flow, pedestrian access and practical feasibility before voting to support continuing the work, per the same Cleveland.com account. Officials say the commission is expected to adopt the guidelines before they move to City Council, which will hold its first reading of the plan next Tuesday, August 25.
What Residents Told the City They Want
The push for a cohesive downtown plan is grounded in resident input. Twinsburg collected 533 community survey responses in March, and more than 30 percent of respondents identified pedestrian safety as their top priority, with downtown's visual appearance ranking second, the report notes.
City communications coordinator Shaun Castillo wrote that residents and business owners can review the plan, ask questions, share ideas and help shape downtown's future through the city's online engagement tools. Twinsburg launched the Together Twinsburg portal specifically to collect structured comments on the draft guidelines ahead of the Planning Commission meeting and the council reading, according to a city announcement, with representatives noting that portal submissions document feedback more reliably than scattered social media comments.
Sorting Streets Into Corridors
Under the draft framework, Twinsburg is classifying its downtown streets according to how they function. Ravenna Road and Cannon Road are designated community corridors, East Aurora Road carries the same community corridor label, and Darrow Road — also known as Ohio 91 — is designated a commercial corridor emphasizing safe movement, visibility and landscaping. East Aurora Road, Church Street and Ravenna Road together form what the guidelines call an activity corridor built around pedestrians.
Roundabouts appear among the concepts included in the guidelines, though city officials stress those are not commitments to actually build them. Any changes touching Ohio 82 or Ohio 91 will require additional traffic and safety studies, and Twinsburg must coordinate directly with the Ohio Department of Transportation before pursuing work on those state routes.
The Church Street Question
The most closely watched piece of the plan involves Church Street, which could be reduced to one-way traffic to free up room for sidewalks, landscaping, festivals, outdoor dining and other community events. But the city's own planning portal acknowledges that no formal traffic study has been completed for that conversion, leaving open the question of whether vehicle traffic would spill onto neighboring residential streets such as Maple Drive.
That uncertainty sits alongside a broader challenge the guidelines are meant to address: some Twinsburg residents currently have to drive downtown because pedestrian connections remain incomplete, with gaps in sidewalks and other walkways limiting how easily people can get around on foot. The city previously received an AMATS Connecting Communities planning grant that funded the First Mile/Last Mile Community Connections Plan, which identified key pedestrian and trail links to central destinations, according to the Akron Metropolitan Area Transportation Study.
Twinsburg has already tested smaller-scale pedestrian fixes downtown. In April 2025, the city reconfigured the intersection of Ravenna Road and Church Street by removing a traffic signal, converting Church Street to a stop-sign approach, shortening pedestrian crossing distances and adding a Pedestrian Rapid Flash Beacon, changes that followed a citywide traffic study and a 90-day trial period.
Zoning, Funding and What Comes Next
Beyond the physical street redesigns, City Council will consider whether to fold portions of the guidelines into the city's zoning regulations. Twinsburg has partnered with planning consultants ZoneCo and OHM Advisors to update its municipal code and create a dedicated Downtown District zoning framework, an effort intended to modernize the rules that will govern future development in the central core.
City officials say Twinsburg needs an adopted plan in hand before it can pursue further studies and access some grant funding, which is part of why the guidelines are moving through the approval process now even though no construction projects have been approved. The framework functions as a zoning foundation and long-range vision rather than a green light for physical work, with future traffic studies, ODOT sign-offs and dedicated funding still required before shovels hit the ground.
The timing lands just after downtown streets served a very different purpose. Church Street, Ravenna Road and Maple Drive all saw temporary closures this month to accommodate the 51st annual Twins Days Festival, an event Hoodline covered in its report on Twinsburg's 80s-themed twin bash, underscoring how these same corridors already double as community gathering spaces once a year.
The stakes extend beyond foot traffic counts. Direct visitor spending in Summit County reached $1.67 billion in 2025, supporting more than 21,000 jobs and generating $177.7 million in state and local tax revenue, according to the Akron/Summit Convention & Visitors Bureau. Twinsburg's own economic base has shifted in recent years too — the former Chrysler Stamping Plant, which once employed more than 5,000 workers before closing in 2009, is now Cornerstone Business Park, a roughly 3-million-square-foot industrial hub anchored by tenants including Amazon, FedEx Ground, Lowe's and PepsiCo. With a population of 19,410 and a median household income of $99,144 according to Census Bureau data, Twinsburg's downtown redesign reflects a suburb trying to pair its industrial growth with a more walkable civic core.
