Good morning, RVA! It's 52 °F, and, look!, another great day of weather sits ahead of us. Expect highs in the upper 70s and lots of good vibes. Rain moves in and sets up shop for most of the day tomorrow, though.
Water cooler
The Richmond Police Department is reporting that Daniel A. Stark, a man in his 30s, was murdered this past Tuesday. Officers arrived to the 1800 block of Fernbrook Drive and found Stark "unresponsive and suffering from trauma."
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 805↗️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 9↘️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 58↗️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 20, Henrico: 31, and Richmond: 7). Since this pandemic began, 382 people have died in the Richmond region. Here's an updated stacked graph of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. While we have had a couple of 1,000+ days of reported new positive cases recently, you can see how this week's reporting issue continues to skew the seven-day average upward (currently at 1,131). You don't see a similar, corresponding uptick in hospitalizations. I wonder if the upward trend we're seeing in the number of new local cases is related to the statewide reporting issue or not? The level of community transmission, updated weekly and tracked on the Pandemic Metrics Dashboard, did revert back up to "substantial community transmission" after a couple weeks at the lower "moderate community transmission" level. That was a lot of words and links to say "stay vigilant, wash your hands, wear your mask, and keep your distance."
This piece by Eric Kolenich at the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the varying procedures (and subsequent COVID-19 case counts) at our colleges and universities has some interesting tidbits. I'm surprised-but-not-surprised by the fact that the State has not mandated some standard way for colleges—especially public colleges—to track, test, and report the coronavirus on their campuses. It makes it extremely hard to understand why the virus has spread in some places and not others—which, if you'll remember that good longread from a couple days ago, is maybe just this virus's scene. Also, for what it's worth, I don't believe student behavior varies from campus to campus. Young people will young people wherever they may roam, and I don't believe that the personal behavior of Rams vs. Dukes will tell us much about how to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.
Chris Suarez, also at the RTD, has an update on City Council's plans for last year's budget surplus. The vast majority of that money will head into a rain-day fund, and that sounds great to me. Council did quash the Mayor's plan to spend $500,000 of that extra cash on some health initiatives, which is a lot of money but only 2.6% of the total estimated surplus. This Council has, in the past, often spent large amounts of time deliberating tiny amounts of money. Sometimes, I think that comes from a place of good oversight—Councilman Addison said he'd be concerned about using this one-time money to fund on-going initiatives. Sometimes, though, it feels like City Council wants to flex against the mayor. And sometimes it just feels like Council loses the big picture and gets caught up in the details.
I wrote about GRTC's Route #77 community meeting yesterday, and I wanted to make sure to link y'all to the full and final public comment PDF. Out of 96 total comments received before the meeting, 76 were in favor of the new-and-improved #77 and 20 were opposed. Many of those in favor even live in the Fan itself! That's great work, and I felt real emotions reading through some of these pro-bus comments. It's just incredibly comforting to know that lots of folks out there are willing to put in the work to make our city a better place.
What to quote from in this RTD column by Don O'Keefe?? There's just so much! How about "automobile use is a public health crisis." Or "To counter [spawl], we need to concentrate new development in already-settled areas. This means increasing density, and every neighborhood should play a part in providing new sites for housing and other functions." But this right here is the best bit: "If we continue to limit housing supply, fight nonresidential uses and impose parking requirements, we will perpetuate the same sins that guided Richmond’s ill-advised, anti-urban and racist planning decisions in the mid-20th century. We must not continue to prioritize the aesthetic preferences of middle- and upper-class whites over the needs of working people who increasingly are priced out of urban neighborhoods. Living in a walkable urban neighborhood should not be a privilege for the few; it should be a viable option for families of any income level."
Speaking of, Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense says developers will try to rezone the surface-level parking lot on the northwest corner of Broad & 17th to TOD-1. This zoning category would allow for density, housing, retail—all kinds of things that are 100% better than a gravel parking lot in the dang center of our city. With a lot of planning work going on in and around Shockoe, I wonder how new private development will fit into those efforts. I would want whatever replaces this gross parking lot to thoughtfully co-exist with the plans for a museum and public space interpreting enslavement in America.
Oh, snap! From Attorney General Mark Herring's twitter account yesterday morning, "Judge says he will GRANT our request to extend voter registration deadline until 11:59pm on Thursday, October 15. Register to vote now!!" If your extremely last-minute plans to register to vote were dashed by a fiber optic cable mishap, you now have until 11:59 PM tonight to register. DO IT.
Today, from 9:30–11:30 AM, at Epiphany Lutheran Church (1400 Horsepen Road), the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts will host another COVID-19 community testing event. This one is drive-thru only, but!, I now know that they will accept walk/roll-ups if your car is in the shop or is a bus or a bicycle.
Logistical note! I am out of town tomorrow, so you should not expect a email from me—or at least you shouldn't expect a morning email newsletter from me. If you send me an email directly for some reason, I'll probably respond!
This morning's patron longread
Why Women Are Biking in Record Numbers in N.Y.C.
Submitted by Patron Lisa. This is so exciting to see, and just highlights the need in Richmond to keep striping bike/walk/roll lanes as fast as possible. The pace really has picked up, but lets keep at it.
In many cities, but perhaps most notably in New York, much of that growth has been driven by a surge in the number of women who took to bicycling after lockdown orders eliminated the main barrier research has shown keeps women from cycling: streets that often feel perilous for cyclists. In New York, there were an estimated 80 percent more cycling trips in July compared with the same month last year, with biking by women rising by 147 percent and increasing by 68 percent among men, according to data from Strava Metro, a mobility tracking application used by 68 million people globally.
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