At its height, it reached three feet. The color of chocolate milk, the water flooded The Tricycle Shop’s first-floor retail and café space, submerging bistro tables and balance bikes, buoying trash cans and stacks of paper cups, lapping at the midsections of mannequins sporting branded jerseys. Hurricane Ida’s September 2021 rampage through the Philadelphia region
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In business there are two certainties: convenience is never without cost, and sudden changes — disruptions — create new opportunities. The escalating demand for “last mile delivery,” the process by which industries and companies ship goods directly to the customer, is a textbook example of costs and opportunities. Even if you are among the estimated
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Just as there is no agreed-upon definition for “gentrification” or “safety,” there are no universal standards when it comes to gathering community feedback. A decade-long South Philadelphia streets fiasco demonstrates this idea in a perfect microcosm: Washington Avenue and its controversial repaving. Washington Avenue is a wide corridor housing businesses and residences on either side
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Some are compression-short-wearing athletes who trek through the trails of the Wissahickon or beside the Schuylkill River. Some are commuters, taking the city’s bike lanes to and from work every day. Others are “wheelie” kids, groups of teenagers and young adults pulling tricks down Broad Street, not a single care or helmet in sight. All
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Spring Garden Street, which runs from river to river, is currently a fast but miserable route for a cyclist to cut across Center City. Much of it is unshaded and exposed to the sun, and the bike lane isn’t protected by anything but a white stripe on the asphalt. At the eastern end, cyclists who
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As is too often the case in Philadelphia, when a project takes one step forward, someone, somewhere, decides to bring it two steps back. That one step forward happened for bicycling infrastructure last summer, when Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell introduced an ordinance that would allow for a protected bike lane along 11 blocks of Chestnut Street, between
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When Russell Meddin began reading about Mobike in April 2016, he felt he’d come across something big. The private bike-sharing company had begun serving Chinese cities without the use of docking stations. Rather than renting a bicycle from a quarter-block-sized station, and returning it to one, Mobike allows users to leave their bicycles anywhere.
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You can barely hear Richard Fredricks’ remarks over the sanitation truck across the street and the heavy sheets of rain coming down on dozens of umbrellas at 11th and Spruce streets in December. Barely a month prior, Fredricks’ daughter Emily, 24, was killed on her bike by the driver of a trash truck when she
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