Residents of a senior housing facility on Melroy Avenue in Lackawanna continued Monday to push city officials on creating a striped crosswalk that would allow them to walk more safely from their apartments across the street to a parking lot.
“As far as nobody being injured there yet, it’s only a miracle,” Karen Sarach, a resident of the Victory Ridge Apartments at 55 Melroy, said during a City Council meeting.
Residents of the apartments have been asking the city for nearly a year to improve safety conditions on a street where they say traffic turning from Ridge Road is traveling at a high rate of speed, making it difficult for senior citizens with limited mobility to cross safely to where their cars are parked.
Many of them returned again to address the Council, which has been hearing from residents and their advocates for the past several months.
“They come around that corner, and you’d think they were headed for salvation,” Sarach said of the quick-moving cars.
Delta Development, property manager of the Victory Ridge Apartments, submitted a proposal to the Council for a striped crosswalk accompanied by signs placed east and west of the crosswalk on Melroy to alert motorists.
The property manager has proposed paying for some of the improvements.
“We do not want a tragedy,” said Bernadette Harlan, executive director of Delta Development.
Sarach and others criticized city officials for dragging their feet.
“You’ll table it for how long? Until one of us is killed?” she asked. “Why do we have to make a simple thing a big process?”
City Attorney Norman LeBlanc said the issue wasn’t so simple, because putting in a crosswalk potentially would put the city at financial risk.
The city is under no obligation to create a crosswalk, he said, and its liability in case of an accident on Melroy only increases if it takes such action.
So any solution developed to make crossing safer for seniors has to be done “in such a way that it minimizes risk to the city,” he said. “It’s not that we don’t want to resolve the issue.”
Council President Henry R. Pirowski said Council members weren’t ignoring the residents’ concerns.
“No one on this Council denies that there’s an issue that needs to be taken care of,” he said.

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