Good morning, RVA! It’s 41 °F and rainy. Temperatures are a bit cooler today, staying below 60 °F, and you should probably expect rain at some point throughout the day. This weekend though! A+!
Water cooler
Reminder: Clocks spring forward on Sunday. I dislike how chipper the clocks seem about this.
Today, in Council Chambers at 3:00 PM, Mayor Stoney will deliver his proposed budget to City Council. You can, of course, show up in person like an awesome nerd, or you can listen online (still nerdy, but less awesome). We’ve heard about ending fines for all library patrons and $30 million for paving, but what else will we learn about in today’s budget presentation? The budget is the manifestation of the City’s priorities, and as such I’m looking for a commitment to priorities like: schools, transit, housing, and sustainability. I’m also looking to see if / how many of the dozens and dozens of vacant City positions get filled. We can’t have excellent core services if the entire City is run by a skeleton crew! We’ll learn a lot more at 3:00 PM, stay tuned!
Holy smokes, the Department of Public Works announced that construction on the Brook Road, Malvern Avenue, and Patterson Avenue bike lanes will begin on March 16th. That’s, like, 10 days from now! DPW says all three projects should wrap up in nine months—which feels like forever—but means we’ll have more safe, protected ways to get around by bike, scooter, skateboard, whatever, before the end of the year! I am so incredibly excited about this. Bikes!
Samuel Northrop at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the details on a new partnership between Richmond Public Schools and J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College "to create a shared career and technical education facility." 💸 Altria donated the building at 2325 Maury Street on the Southside, just off Route 1 and easily accessible by the #3 bus, to RPS a while back, and this seems like a great use of the space. Due to the partnership with the community college system, it sounds like there could be both state and private money available for rehabbing the facility. The new center could open as soon as 2022.
Redistricting reform is officially too complicated for me to understand. If you have a subscription to the RTD you can read this piece by Mel Leonor about the latest attempt from House democrats to propose something other than the Constitutional Amendment from last year 💸. Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury has an unpaywalled take. It’s also worth reading through Del. Cia Price’s Twitter feed since she’s one of the Delegates looking for amendment alternatives. And, of course, give a couple scrolls to @1VA2021—they’re amendment supporters and have been the group working for redistricting reform over the last several years.
This piece about the new speed cameras bill by Roger Chelsey in the Virginia Mercury makes me feel weird. Speed is what kills people on our streets: The chance of a person dying when hit by a driver increases dramatically at speeds above 25 mph. Chelsey says he was once “clocked going 11 miles per hour over the 25 mph limit on a steep downhill avenue.” That’s incredibly dangerous. From the aforelinked ProPublica piece: “a person is about 70 percent more likely to be killed if they’re struck by a vehicle traveling at 30 mph versus 25 mph.” It doesn’t matter if you feel like you aren’t driving any faster than the other folks around you, and it doesn’t matter if you have some sort of brainworm that makes you think the speed limits are “artificially low, especially on some of the wider thoroughfares, just to boost fines.” Speeding is dangerous, and you should cut it out. Plus, the bill in question (HB 1442) would only allow speed cameras near schools and work zones—places where you should 100% take your foot off the gas. Slow down, save lives.
Important Duke’s mayonnaise news from Trevor Dickerson at RVAHub: “A new line called Duke’s Southern Sauces will begin hitting shelves this month.” Listen, sauces are delicious, and I will dip almost anything in a good sauce.
This morning’s longread
Parasite director Bong Joon-ho: ‘Korea seems glamorous, but the young are in despair’
I still haven’t seen Parasite yet, but I love a lot of Bong Joon-ho’s other films. I just checked, and you can rent it on iTunes! Now I know what I’m doing this weekend.
Social division is a theme that runs through much of Bong’s work, and, despite his avowed neutrality, he tends to favour the underdogs. His 2006 film, The Host, for example, also focused on a poor but loving family running a food stall, again led by Song. They take on a mutant fish-monster accidentally created by pollution from the US military in Seoul’s Han River. In Okja, it was a down-to-earth country girl who battles a dystopian corporation to save her only friend, a strangely adorable giant mutant pig. Snowpiercer, adapted from a French graphic novel, stages a class revolt on board a train containing the entire postapocalyptic population of the world – a horizontal counterpart to Parasite’s vertical class stratification. Chris Evans leads an assault by the have-nots at the rear on the privileged passengers dwelling at the front.
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