July 25: Philly as car-free retirement colony | Radar gun fight | African-Americans and bike share | $10.5B in new transpo projects

Philadelphia made TheStreet’s top 5 list of cities for people looking to retire without a car. We’ve been seeing a lot of Baby Boomers moving to Center City, in addition to all the Millennials, seeking out walkable neighborhoods. City politics has yet to process this reality though, and there is still a lot of political trepidation about allowing medium-rise mixed-use buildings with no parking.

Next City continues following the fight in Harrisburg over whether police should be allowed to use machines to determine how fast people are speeding. Pennsylvania bars local cops from using radar guns, and from installing speed cameras. Senator Mike Stack has been pushing a bill to install speed cameras on Roosevelt Blvd.

“The Philly skyline is the porridge: it’s just right.”

With state transportation funding on the way, the Delaware Regional Planning Commission voted to add $10.5 billion worth of projects to their long-range plan. But PennDOT Secretary Barry Schoch says Congress could undermine Pennsylvania’s progress if they fail to agree on a long-term transportation funding solution soon. 

Will local fiber become an issue in the 2015 campaign? Small cities around the country are looking at getting their own gigabit fiber networks installed to compete with giant ISPs like Comcast, and they’re all going to have faster Internet service than us soon. Will any Council candidates dare propose inviting in gigabit fiber companies into Comcast’s backyard?

And People For Bikes asks why African-Americans are less likely to ride bikes. The question is salient here because local transportation planners want to make Philadelphia’s bike-share system the most inclusive: “Black people are disproportionately likely to live in older cities with connected street grids; they are disproportionately likely to live in poverty; and African-American householders are twice as likely as other householders to live without a car. (About 20 percent of black householders don’t own a motor vehicle.) All these factors tend to increase bike transportation. But among African-Americans, the connection seems to be weaker.”