Wow. This editorial's dismissal of the concerns from Roxborough and Manayunk over the Bus Revolution is completely out of touch. Hundreds of mostly senior and working class people showed up at the last community meeting with SEPTA. The venue was at capacity so people stood out in the rain and waited for a second presentation. The plan eliminates a heavily used route (the 27) and forces all of those seniors to walk up to Ridge Ave. to catch the 9 in the hilliest part of the city. Then all those seniors have to transfer at 30th St. to either another bus line or the trolley to get to Center City, where many of the stations still are not ADA compliant.

Curtis Jones is absolutely right with his criticism. Nobody who takes that bus line could have thought that was a reasonable change to the service. I'd love to hear the geniuses on the editorial board explain their statement that all these riders would benefit. The SEPTA planners couldn't seem to make a convincing argument through several hours of community meetings.

Electric cars are still a tiny share of the demand. On the other hand, more buildings are switching to heat pumps or being built with heat pumps from the get go. They're very efficient, but it's still electrical demand that wasn't there before. The price of natural gas is going up (and will continue to as we liquify and export it, which is accelerating that trend toward electric.

I feel for them because

• A. it's horrible
• B. it's the holidays
• C. everyone's making jokes about it all over social media

Which was the style at the time

What was Jeffrey Dahmer's cause? Or any number of other serial killers? Forget serial killers, how about the guys who shot up Roxborough high school and also killed someone the day before? Are they all mentally ill? Psychologists say no. Not every heinously violent person gets that diagnosis.

The SEPTA police captain here doesn't have any qualifications to make that judgment, and saying so downplays the severity of the attacks.

People here need to do a little reading.

Found all the republicans blaming mental health instead of guns after mass shootings.

"She definitely has to be suffering from some kind of mental illness." -Captain Rodger Walls

Everyone wants to scapegoat mental illness for violence. Not all violent people meet the criteria for being deemed mentally ill.

I didn't know the SEPTA police chief was qualified to make mental health diagnoses.

Most people, including preservationists, would have been fine with an overbuild there. It was absolutely possible and the development would have taken a nearly identical form except the podium cladding would've been original walls instead of new materials.

Toll wasn't willing to waste any brainpower on that. Ironically Pearl, on the other hand, has done overbuilds with at least one more planned near Rittenhouse.

It's been Hawthorne since before you were born. The old school building at 11th and Washington was the Hawthorne School, and the projects to the north were called Hawthorne Square. The name got attached to the whole surrounding area.

Honestly you couldn't ask for a better year to make this run. In a normal year the Union would be drowned out by the Eagles no matter what, but this year they get to be in the "Phillies are in the World Series, Eagles are undefeated... And oh yeah, the Union's going to the MLS Cup" conversation and feed on the insane level of sports enthusiasm flowing through the city's veins right now.

Agreed with OP.

But Parks and Rec just cut down hundreds of mature and heritage trees in FDR Park this summer and is planning on cutting down dozens of acres more as part of the Master Plan, and that is going to have a far greater impact than any development in the city you can point to.

There is a rule now: https://www.pennfuture.org/Blog-Item-Philly-Tree-Fund-Bill-A-Significant-Step-in-Protection-of-Tree-Canopy

Trees must be replaced depending on the size of the tree, or money must be paid into the Tree Fund to pay for the replacement elsewhere. It's a step in the right direction but needs to be stronger. It's anywhere from 10-20° cooler in tree-filled NW Philly than it is in treeless concrete hellscape South Philly on hot summer days, and it's only getting worse with Parks and Rec cutting down hundreds of mature trees in FDR Park.

Our own Parks system under Kathryn Ott Lovell with the help of the Fairmount Parks Conservancy under Maura McCarthy singlehandedly undid the benefits of years of street tree planting in one fell swoop this summer.

Kind of a joke to worry about what developers are doing when the city isn't subject to the same restrictions.

Brown doesn't just sell soda, he has other goods to spread the costs to. His stores are largely in poorer neighborhoods and I don't shed a tear for someone who wants to charge poor people 100% of a tax to make a political statement.

His stores are unionized, and yet big bad Amazon pays its Whole Foods employees better.

What's your point? Jeff Brown also pays his workers less than other retailers. We should applaud him though because he's local?

The bottlers/distributors pass it on to retailers as a political statement. Some retailers eat it entirely or partially. Jeff Brown has made it his biggest political issue and passes it on 100% to consumers, and puts signs throughout his stores pointing the finger at the city for people's sugary beverages costing more. It's his decision to charge consumers for the entirety of the amount of the tax.

On a completely different note, his stores in poor neighborhoods have THE MOST sensitive self-checkout sensors. If you bring your own bag and put it in the wrong place, it starts blaring alarms at you because he treats all of his customers like criminals.

Good take. One could have read the report and interpreted it as suggesting the police are set up to fail and the department needs reform to better support the rank and file. McNesby instead sees everything through and Us vs. Them lens and took it as an attack on the police force as a whole.

Rhynhart only sought the controller job as a stepping stone to a mayoral run. This was clear as day from the outset. She wasn't going to stay on as a career city controller.

Imagine him as Mayor with veto power over a bill that affects large commercial landlords. He might have good ideas or be an ethical person, but there is no untangling the massive conflict of interest someone with his business dealings has while being Mayor.

All his opponents need to do is show a picture of the soda price tag on his shelf with a tagline of "wealthy grocery baron Jeff Brown passes 100% of his soda taxes onto his low income customers"

It's weird to write a puff piece about a candidate with no real substance. The astute reader can draw their own conclusions about conflicts of interest, but this article is silent on them.

Domb potentially has more conflicts of interest than any other candidate to have ever run for Mayor in Philadelphia. The other article that was linked in the comments here addresses some of them. But if you only read one article about Domb and it's OP's, you'll go on thinking about how industrious he's been his whole life.

I read this article and thought, "what the fuck is this?" Ryan Briggs had an urgent deadline? It definitely fills in the gaps in my knowledge because Domb isn't a self promoter like others, but it's a totally weird piece to publish.

Agreed 100%. His retail politics are atrocious and it undermines his stated mission.

u/GreenAnder 's comment is a good explanation of the machinations behind that outcome. But on a practical level, the judge set it at 170k because people in PA have a right to bail except for in the case of capital crimes (his convictions were not) and/or they pose an immediate threat to public safety. The latter seems clear with 20/20 hindsight, but at the time he was convicted we didn't have Precogs proving that he was going to go out and shoot up a school. Million dollar bail can be argued as denial of bail (because it's meant to be) and a violation of civil rights.

This judge attempted to balance the constitutional right to bail with risk to public safety and the judge judged wrongly here.

Krasner's office requested $1 million bail, which is as close as they can get to denying bail. The judge rejected the request and granted $180,000 bail.

This has been a common thread in a few other cases where offenders were out on bail. So if we want to assign blame, we should make sure the judges are held accountable too.