Hanna Kahler lives in West Philadelphia and rides her blue commuter bicycle to work in the Graduate Hospital neighborhood, a trip she says takes 18 minutes. When she spoke to Grid on Feb. 12, more than two weeks after the last snowflakes of the Jan. 25 winter storm fell, she was still unable to ride
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Across the nation, more and more youth are reaching for a bicycle for recreation and as a means of transportation. In fact, the advocacy group PeopleforBikes found in a 2024 survey that ridership for children ages 3 to 17 increased from 46% to 56%, reversing a decline. And on March 14 and 15 at the
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For Ana, 19, of Brazil, and Jonathan, 17, of Guatemala, the southern border of the United States marks the line between life and death. Ana and Jonathan, both clients of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of Pennsylvania (HIAS PA), a local humanitarian nonprofit that provides legal services to low-income immigrants in the state, now live
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Amanda Parezo isn’t your typical bike lane advocate. For one thing, she doesn’t ride a bike. Parezo once loved cycling around Philadelphia. But in 2021, after a game of kickball at Hancock Playground in East Kensington, she was struck in the back by a stray bullet and paralyzed from the waist down. Now, she gets
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In the late 18th century, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier radically changed how we understand the physical world. He was perplexed by the fact that when metal rusted, despite becoming more brittle, it actually gained weight rather than losing it. Why would metal weigh more when it was decomposing? It weighed more, Lavoisier came to
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By all accounts, 67-year-old Harry Fenton was a model of safe cycling. He used hand signals when he was turning and stopped at every stop sign and red light, even when there wasn’t a car anywhere in sight. To be visible, he wore fluorescent jackets, vests and shirts, and he never left the house without
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For roughly 20% of Americans who ride public transportation, the Transit app is their guide. Displaying nearby routes and mapping step-by-step transit directions, it also asks users to give feedback on their rides. But for SEPTA riders, their responses to Transit’s in-app questions about station and vehicle conditions during a trip and overall satisfaction at
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Last year I wrote a series of columns in Grid about several ways the City of Philadelphia could expand composting. While I have had some productive conversations with City officials over the last year, I have seen no indication that they are prepared to begin any large scale residential composting pilot program in the near
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The overgrown lot at 5308 Parrish St. in the Haddington neighborhood of West Philadelphia is getting back to its roots. After sitting abandoned, accumulating trash, construction debris and dumped car parts for over a decade, a new project is in progress to restore the space to a new iteration of its past life as a
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The air in the Delaware Valley’s industrial corridor doesn’t always smell nice. Major odor events assaulted the noses of Delaware County residents in 2019, 2020 and, most recently, last fall. During the 2019 event, Clean Air Council director of programs Eve Miari tried to check air quality readings from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
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