03/13/2023
I need people local in the Lackawanna valley to help me out with my ideas for improved non car related infrastructure. I NEED SUPPORT FROM OUR COMMUNITY. I need people messaging and calling out representatives. I can’t do this alone and if it ends up with me doing it alone none of this will get done. I need people that care about this as much as me to reach out to other like minded people and get them on board as well. I have a list of ideas and if  necessary I will write them all down and distribute them so you have talking points but this won’t be done by just a couple people we need to get a movement together to get this going. Our area is dense enough for the projects that need to be done, and this would be beneficial for small businesses, people without cars, kids and anyone else that doesn’t feel like having a car should be the only way to get from point A to point B. It’s going to start getting warmer out soon and we need to start moving fast with this. Getting off the subject, but not quite to be honest there’s a for-profit company that has decided to create weekend excursion train trips from Pittston to Jim Thorpe, and the tickets are ridiculous. No working class person would be able to afford tickets like that so instead of creating affordable commuter train service from, let’s say Carbondale to Scranton then Scranton to Wilkes-Barre and Wilke-Barre to Jim Thorpe they’ve decided to just have pretty expensive weekend excursion trips from Pittston to Jim Thorpe. Those tracks do go all the way to Allentown and I believe at this point you can take a train from Allentown to Philadelphia so you wouldn’t even need a car to get there but instead big business decided to hell with common people and let’s have cushy excursions to the Switzerland of Pennsylvania but that’s not all that I’m worried about amd even tho it’s frustrating to me there are easily more fixable things to be accomplished. We have no bike lanes on our main roads. We do have a nice rails to trails route that goes through the heart of our valley, but there are no spur routes to get to that rails to trails route even though we could very easily build those routes to make it easier for people in this area to get around. Our bus service is completely lacking in terms of stops and I know I’ve said this 1 million times by now I live in Eynon and there’s no bus stop in this town and I have to walk or ride all the way down to the old Mid Valley Hospital which is about 2 miles away to pick up a bus and even then half the time the buses don’t take you where you need to go. Our sidewalks are severely lacking in a majority of the area and that needs to be improved. The road that takes you from Eynon to Peckville is an extremely hilly
winding and dangerous road to walk or ride a bicycle down and sooner or later someone will get killed, and that road is most certainly wide enough for a sidewalk on one side and a bike lane on the other side, but because we are so focused on car infrastructure in this area it doesn’t seem like anything will ever be done unless we come together and try and fix these problems and I am only speaking of the areas around where I live. I’m sure there are the same problems in Carbondale and Mayfield and Jermyn and all the other boroughs around here, I do know that Olyphant and Throop have done a lot in terms of building really nice sidewalks on their main roads but that’s only two boroughs. We need to start getting angry about this and we need to start coming together. I don’t really go on any other social media apps so the people that are interested in helping out to try and get these things accomplished should go on the neighborhood app or Snapchat or any of the other ones, I don’t know how half of them work and I’m getting older and don’t really understand half of them, but if you need a list of talking points and are interested in helping, please let me know. If we can get enough people together, we can meet in person or we can do video conferencing and come up with plans together. I’m definitely not opposed to car culture. I do love cars, but we need more than cars especially in an area as dense as ours, where it is very expensive to own a car, I know it always comes up when people hear people like me talk about walking, biking, and mass transit infrastructure push so hard and they think “God that person hates cars” but that couldn’t be further from the truth. We need them but we need a lot more options and we really only have the cars in this area 100 years ago. You could take a trolley from Scranton all the way past the Nicholson bridge and I’m just gonna leave it there. Hopefully I get some people that are, as hopeful for change as I am if you want to help out message me on Facebook if you have my number message me on there. Thank you so much for read all of this and hopefully we can get some of this accomplished. If you don’t want to message this page my name is Adam Hill and you can message me on my private page or if you know me and have my number just message me there.
Real quick update!: even though we really still do need the support of the community I do have a meeting with one of our local reps coming up to talk about the the things I mentioned in this post hopefully he takes it seriously, I think he will because I’ve known him since I was a kid and he does actually care about the area. Fingers crossed!
