October 30: PICA criticizes tax appeal bottleneck | LOVE Park’s missing road diet | Taxi revenues down

Solomon Leach flags a letter from the Intergovernment Cooperation Authority, the city’s fiscal watchdog, to the Board of Revision of Taxes calling them out on their large and stubborn backlog of over 2,500 property tax appeals, representing more than $6 billion in assessed value, and a bit less than $30 million in real estate taxes. 

William West questions why the west side of LOVE Park will still have five travel lanes after the big redesign. While commending the removal of the slip lane from JFK onto 16th Street, he points out that up until Chestnut Street, 16th Street has only two travel lanes, balloons out to five lanes for just two blocks, and then shrinks back to three at the Parkway. This area is one of Center City’s top pedestrian crash locations.

Neighbors from Wissi­nom­ing, Ta­cony, May­fair, Holmes­burg, Up­per Holmes­burg and East Tor­res­dale in the Northeast met to discuss the future of vacant riverfront land at the second public meeting on the North Delaware District Plan, reports Willam Kenny. Residents explored improving east-west street connections to the riverfront, possible residential development opportunities on those streets, and the option of creating a new public park similar to Pennypack on the Delaware to the north.

Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds-Brown introduced a bill that would require developers to install the infrastructure for future electric car charging stations in 10% of the parking spaces they build, reports Tom MacDonald. To be clear, the charging stations themselves wouldn’t be required, just the capacity to easily install them in the future.

Mitchell Bormack, VP of natural gas firm TRC Companies, Inc. cracked the door open slightly on the confidential discussions Philadelphia city officials and natural gas companies have been having about making Philly into an energy hub at Penn State’s Natural Gas Utilization Conference this week.

Via Philly Mag, these ten sliders from RENTCafe help visualize Philly’s development boom by sliding betwen 2007 and 2014 photos of various intersections around the city that have seen major changes.

Drone photographer Matt Satell of Philly By Air has a new video up called Abandoned Philadelphia, with unique views of the PECO Delaware Station, Willow Steam Plant, Richmond Power Station and more.

Medallion cab revenues are down 7% since last year when Uber X entered the Philly market, reports Todd Bookman. State lawmakers appear ready to legalize “transportation network companies” like Uber X and Lyft statewide, though not without putting some special perks for medallion cabs in the bill, like a monopoly on airport service and use of taxi stands.