Good morning, RVA! It's 52 °F, and today looks beautiful with sunny highs in the low 80s. Richmond in the fall! It's the best time of year!
Water cooler
This morning, even before I woke up, the Governor hosted a press conference celebrating new train service to Main Street Train Station. Richmonders, if they can drag themselves out of bed, can now catch a train from downtown and end up in D.C. before the work day begins or, according to the press release, make it to "New York for a lunchtime meeting." I think the goal is ultimately hourly service between D.C. and Richmond, so this is just step one out of one million to bringing frequent, higher-speed rail service to Richmond, connecting us to the rest of the Northeast. By the way, here's what a 5:00 AM ribbon-cutting ceremony looks like. Too intense, even for me!
City Council will meet tonight with an enormous 58-item agenda. I've written about most of these before, but tonight Council will consider a ton of transportation-related papers securing or asking for money from the state for bike and pedestrian projects, and bunch of cat- and dog-related papers that mostly change the rules for pet owners, the bow and arrow ordinance, and those two resolutions to move forward with re-rezoning the southern side of Broad Street (those are all currently on the Consent Agenda, too). The resolution asking the Planning Commission to make sense of Council's laundry list of Richmond 300 amendments has been continued until November 8th, and the resolution formally accepting the Mayor's nomination of Lincoln Saunders as CAO has been continued until October 11th.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch's Jessica Nocera has an interesting piece on Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas's immigration story. From Greece, to Queens, to Cleveland, to Henrico, Vithoulkas grew up in the County, went to J.R. Tucker, and now runs the place! And it's an increasingly diverse place. Take a look these demographics Nocera pulled for the article: "Nearly 13% of Henrico residents are foreign-born, according to U.S. Census data. Henrico’s Asian population, recorded at 9.7% according to 2020 census data, is one of the largest in Virginia. Statewide...The county’s Hispanic population is 6.6%, compared with the state’s overall percentage of 10.5%." Tap through and read the whole piece because immigration is a big part of Henrico's story, too.
Chris Suarez, also at the RTD, has yet another example of the consequences of decades of disinvestment in our city's infrastructure. Suarez reports that, even with tens of millions of dollars already spent on new paving and milling, most of our roads need more than a simple resurfacing. So what's the fix? Well, the City Auditor recommends that the director of DPW "continue to seek additional infrastructure funding for longer term rehabilitation and reconstruction of problematic roads", which is certainly easier said than done from a director-level position. I'm optimistic, though, because Richmond's transportation staff seems pretty skilled at scoring money for interesting projects (see above!). And, honestly, we all win if we rehabilitate and reconstruct our problematic roads to be slower, safer, and filled with protected bike and pedestrian infrastructure. There's no better time to build safer sidewalks, intersections, and bike lanes than when you've got the entire street torn up!
Check out this really excellent intersection mural in front of Gallery5 that just got put down over the weekend. So cool! I think this mural adds another great layer to the existing micro-corridor of Marshall and Adams, which is already packed with apartments, shops, restaurants, and neighborhood businesses—plus it's transit- and bike-lane-adjacent, too. More of this everywhere, please!
This morning's longread
Fossil footprints challenge theory of when people first arrived in the Americas
Everything about a fossilized footprint blows my mind.
To securely date a print, researchers must find layers of seeds that can be dated using radiocarbon analysis, below and above layers of footprints. This way scientists can determine the earliest and latest moments in time the horizon of prints were laid down. But season after season, their search for a site with both seeds and footprints was unsuccessful. Then came the fateful day in September 2019 when Bustos and Bennett returned to a bluff in the park they had visited more than a dozen times before. They knew the site harbored ancient seed deposits, but they hadn't yet found human footprints. On this day, however, wind had uncovered a set of unmistakably human prints that ended in a mound of sand. Scraping off the upper sandy layer revealed the ghostly outlines of a buried track.
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