Good morning, RVA! It's 67 °F, and highs are back up near 90 °F today. I think, fingers crossed, we should see a return of the sun as well!
Water cooler
VPAP has all of the primary election results that you could ever want or need. Women won the Democratic primaries in Congressional Districts 1, 2, 6, 7, and 10—that’s 100% of the Democratic races in which a woman was on the ballot! Good luck moving forward to Vangie Williams, Elaine Luria, Jennifer Lewis, Abigail Spanberger, and Jennifer Wexton. Vox even declared Democratic women as one of their winners from Tuesday’s primaries. On the other side of the ticket, Confederate sympathizer Corey Stewart won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate by about 5,000 votes. His fixated-on-the-past supporters chanted “Lock her up!” at his victory party last night. He’s disappointing and disgusting, but his nomination is unfortunately unsurprising. Vox had some words to say about him, too.
Paul Spencer at Style Weekly has the news of a scuffle over how folks are using Scuffletown Park. I get that nearby residents probably don’t want people in this teeny park making noise after dark, buuuuuut you decided to live next to an adorable urban park that sits adjacent to an amazing pizza place and a great spot to buy beer? Also, there’s a different, longer conversations to have about if all of the City’s parks really need to close after dark—especially small parks like Scuffletown that are surrounded by lots of Jane Jacobs-style eyes on the street.
Saffeya Ahmed at RVA Mag talks to some VCU fashion designers and local boutique owners about how they’re working to build a more sustainable fashion industry. That super cheap shirt from H&M is super cheap for a (usually terrible for humans and the environment) reason!
J. Elias O’Neal at Richmond BizSense says Swan Dive has opened in the former Betty on Davis space (805 N. Davis Avenue). This new French-inspired spot has ties to both Black Sheep and Bamboo Café, two of my favorites, and is just down the block from the Science Museum Pulse Station.
I am an old person, and looking at pictures of people playing virtual reality arcade games makes me feel this acutely.
This week’s Richmond 300 parking meetings continue! Today catch the Scott’s Addition meeting at 8:30 AM (3300 W. Clay Street) and the Fan meeting at 6:30 PM (2300 W. Broad Street). Why is having the correct amount of parking important, and why am I always yammering on about the consequences of having too much of it? This presentation does a great job of explaining just that (and also how to get parking right)—thanks to the Partnership of Smarter Growth for sending it my way.
Sports!
- Squirrels beat Portland, 2-1, and look to continue their success at 6:35 PM. Tickets are available online.
- Kickers fell to Penn FC, 2-1.
- Nats got blanked by the Yankees, 0-3. That series continues tonight at 7:05 PM.
This morning's longread
The Menace and the Promise of Autonomous Vehicles
The more I read about autonomous vehicles the more I think that we are years away from seeing any meaningfully successful implementation—and that we are also extremely unprepared for the consequences of that implementation.
That Uber’s AV didn’t see Herzberg, a homeless woman, as a human being makes a kind of perverse sense, since AVs—especially robo-taxis—weren’t made for people like her. Neither were the sprawling cities like Tempe where these cars are being tested. Besides their inviting regulatory environments, these areas were chosen because of their open road systems, good weather, and few cyclists and pedestrians. At a time when urbanists are preaching multi-modal mobility, from bikes to buses, AVs are a kind of throwback, making streets less accommodating to anyone on foot; by increasing the number of cars—particularly passenger-free delivery vehicles—they tend to worsen traffic and pollution. And even if the auto industry could develop an impossibly perfect algorithm for safety, widespread AV adoption would require massive road infrastructure upgrades to fix lane lines and embed communication beacons; faulty GPS systems, outdated maps, surveillance and privacy challenges, cybersecurity flaws, bandwidth limits, and expensive hardware would all be vexing.
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