Good morning, RVA! It's 50 °F, and today looks great. Expect highs in the mid 80s and sunshine. Make sure you remember to water your plants, OK?
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 378 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 13 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 55 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 33, Henrico: 19, and Richmond: 3). Since this pandemic began, 1,309 people have died in the Richmond region. The seven-day average of new reported cases across the state sits at 464. As I mentioned yesterday, you should continue to take these numbers with a grain of salt as things get back on track after a weekend of server maintenance and the ol' Data Reporting Issues. One thing I do wish I'd started tracking last week—and will add a column for somewhere in my spreadsheet—is the number of 10–19 year olds with at least one dose (currently 184,778). That's a weird age range to bucket, given the eligibility requirements of the various vaccines, but you take what the dashboard gives, ya know? Anyway, vaccine uptake in children is really fascinating to me, and I'm interested to see how quickly (or slowly) it grows.
OK, I've got some follow up on yesterday's Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee meeting which I put on as soothing background music while doing real work. First, the committee voted to recommend for approval RES. 2021-R027, the first step in getting rid of parking minimums. Full City Council should consider this paper at their meeting next week. I think it's got the votes, but even in this small committee there were a few concerns. For example, via Chris Suarez in the Richmond Times-Dispatch this quote from Councilmember Jordan: "I don’t think the city is at a point where we can just eliminate them wholesale right now...Knowing the parking situations that we deal with currently, I don’t think this ... can be realistic." Before you nod your head in agreement, remember that getting rid of parking minimums does not remove any parking at all! It just stops forcing businesses to pay for dedicated parking spaces that they may not need or want. Plus, the 2nd District is, by far, the most walkable and bikeable district in the entire City, so maybe ditching parking minimums will have an added benefit of encouraging more active modes of transportation. Anyway, if you'd like to dig in more on what Richmond 300 says about parking, you can check out the 2019 DESMAN parking study.
Second, Maritza Pechin, head of the City's Office of Equitable Development and the person who managed all of the entire Richmond 300 master planning process, gave a presentation on why Council's messy, unorganized laundry list of amendments to the master plan is unneeded and bad process. Really what you're after is slide 16 in that aforelinked presentation: Of Council's proposed amendments, 17 are already included in the plan, five just clarify existing parts of the plan, 24 aren't even within the scope of a master plan (which is ultimately about land use), and 21 are fundamental changes that should require a robust community engagement plan like we saw originally with Richmond 300. I only caught parts of the next steps, but the committee did recommend the resolution be continued and I think encouraged councilmembers with proposed amendment to schedule a meeting with Pechin.
GRTC had a board meeting yesterday, which reminded me that it'd been a while since I last checked in on their monthly ridership reports (p. 31). We're in a really fascinating moment where we can now compare ridership numbers pre-pandemic, deep-pandemic, and coming-out-of-pandemic. Back in April 2019, GRTC saw 767,179 rides across their entire fixed-route transportation network (local service, express service, and the Pulse). In April 2020, that number plummeted to 522,922. But now, as more and more folks scooch back into the world, ridership in April 2021 topped out at 640,941. That's still a 16% decrease from pre-pandemic times, but it's a solid 23% jump from last year. While who knows what this all really means, I think you can say that public transit will not bottom out at deep-pandemic levels and stay there forever. Honestly, this was never really going to be the case in Richmond where our bus system serves so many people who don't have a ton of other options to get around.
Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury takes a look at new data published by the State this month and reports that "Black drivers in Virginia are almost two times more likely than white drivers to be pulled over by police and three times more likely to have their vehicles searched." In fact, Oliver says Black Virginians account for 30% of all traffic stops despite making up only 19% of the state's population. A public defender interviewed for this piece suggests that this is less the result of direct racial bias and more an effect of where police are choosing to set up shop, which sounds like a systemic issue. It reminds me of this quote from yesterday's longread about housing discrimination: "Systemic is the price comparison model...When you only compare homes to like peers in neighborhoods that have been discriminated against, you essentially just recycled discrimination over and over again...You have individual acts of racism and you have more systemic reasons why. Both are robbing people of individual and community wealth."
This morning's longread
It's Time For America's Fixation On Herd Immunity To End, Scientists Say
While I'm not fixated on herd immunity, I am fixated on people trying to figure out how to quantify the end of the pandemic.
The appeal of this notion is clear. Achieving herd immunity sounds like a simple goal that spells the end of the coronavirus. It feels concrete — something to grab onto in a time filled with so much uncertainty, a finish line for which to strive. But the problem with framing the goal that way, say the scientists who actually build the models, is that the herd immunity threshold is far harder to calculate reliably than many in the public realize.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
