State Law Limits Pittsburgh Broadband Options, Says Mayor, Who Welcomes Uber Self-Driving Test

Lifting a Pennsylvania restriction on municipal broadband could spur state smart city initiatives, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto (D) said Wednesday. A Pennsylvania law forces cities and counties with broadband plans to ask their incumbent ISP to implement broadband before the governments can do so themselves. Changing the law “certainly would give us options that cities like Chattanooga have already been able to seize upon,” he said on a live-streamed Washington Post smart cities event. Google Fiber helped in Kansas City and other cities, he said. Pittsburgh could use better broadband, he said. “The amount of information that will be required and the broadband that will be needed will be possibly more than we can provide right now.” The city has dark fiber owned by the utility company, he said. “That could become really the backbone of a system that would then be able to be launched with wireless technology.” Pittsburgh has “been having conversations with DQE,” a subsidiary of the energy company Duquesne Light, he said. The mayor also spoke about Uber, which recently announced Pittsburgh as a test bed for its autonomous cars (see 1609070018). Peduto joked that fear of “robot cars” may be one of three reasons he isn’t re-elected, in addition to bike lanes and welcoming Syrian refugees into the city. People fear a self-driving car will cause an accident, but the reality is that humans cause many accidents, he said. “There will be accidents, but if the greater goal is to make the streets safer in the long term, we have to begin at some point, and we can’t wait for regulation to catch up to innovation.”