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
More
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
More
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
More
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
More
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
More
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
More
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
More
Opening with subterranean footage of the foam cups, plastic bottles and sodden cardboard that decorate the sewer inlets underneath Philadelphia, filmmaker Melissa Langer’s 2025 documentary, “In Excess,” probes into the unseen places where the city’s litter ends up. Spoiler alert: When it comes to the city’s trash, there is no throwing it “away.” “Every object
More
A 1970s-era stereo receiver. Red leather boots. Nine fully intact eggplants. These are just a few of the unexpected objects the Cobbs Creek Ambassadors have come across while cleaning up Cobbs Creek Park in West Philadelphia. But most of what they pick up is just typical litter: bottles, cans, food wrappers, old tires. And the
More
At 11 a.m. on Valentine’s Day, Aspen Simone stood on the corner of 7th and Christian streets in South Philadelphia holding a long dowel with a laminated, cutout pigeon on the end. That wasn’t just any pigeon on the end of Simone’s walk leader staff. Primrose the pigeon is how the whole pigeon education enterprise
More