November 22: No trolleys Sunday | State funds bike projects | PATCO escalator still broken | Building better solar panels | Artist fights to save studio from supermarket

Happy Friday, Streeters! 

Trolleys won’t run in Center City on Sunday. All lines will be down for routine maintenance between 5 a.m. Sunday and 5 a.m. Monday. The 11, 13, 34, and 36 will begin and end at 40th and Market streets. The 10 will begin and end at 40th and Filbert streets. 

Unlike past bills, this new transportation funding package specifically designates state funding to bicycling and pedestrian infrastructure. The bill creates a $144 million multimodal fund for railways, airports, ports, bicycle lanes and pedestrian paths. Programs related to bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure will receive a minimum of $2 million per year. 

The north escalator at PATCO’s 8th and Market streets station has been out of service since August. Officials vow that new crews will begin working on it Monday and apologize to customers who use the station. 

Penn and Drexel researchers are building a better, cheaper solar panel thanks to a ceramic material they have developed for use in place of silicon panels. 

A Philadelphia artist is fighting to protect a huge warehouse he converted into artist studios on a block where the city would like to see a supermarket. The space is in Mantua, between Haverford Avenue and Mount Vernon Street and 36th and 37th streets. There, James Dupree has converted the more than 8,000-square-foot building into art space, but Mantua is a food desert, and a recent master plan calls for building a supermarket, potentially in this space.

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