Good morning, RVA! It's 31 °F, and that is a winter temperature. Today, and for the foreseeable future, you can expect afternoon highs around 50 °F and evening lows in the 30s—a big change from last week’s weirdly warm, weirdly humid situation. While I don’t love biking home from work in the frigid dark, I do always enjoy an opportunity to get the box of scarves out of winter storage.
Water cooler
Don Harrison at Richmond Magazine writes about closing Carytown to vehicle traffic, and comes to the conclusion that it’s just too hard and we shouldn’t even try. I disagree! We could (and should) pilot closing Carytown to cars for just the cost of a couple hundred cones! What if: Every Sunday and on holidays, we put out some signs, cones, and barricades, and opened up Cary Street for folks to walk, roll, and bike around? It’d be a nice compromise between the huge number of people who want a pedestrianized Carytown and the Carytown Merchant’s Association. Technically, this is called a ciclovía and Bogotá, Colombia has been doing them for decades, but we could give it a different name so it felt like something we came up with on our own. It’s so disappointing that we inevitably come up with a bucketful of excuses to not even try these sorts of things. The lack of imagination and exploration into pilot and temporary infrastructure projects is so endemic to Richmond, and we need a handful of fun, successful pilots to show folks what’s possible.
City Council gathers today for their regularly scheduled meeting and you can find the full agenda here. Right before that meeting, however, they’ll discuss the City’s formal State Legislative Priorities—the parchment scroll of demands we give to our lobbyist to take across Broad Street and nail to the General Assembly’s door. The aforelinked PDF is worth scrolling through to get a sense for the City’s priorities (at the top of the list: “preserve and defend Richmond’s authority to hold a casino referendum in 2023”), but you should probably read with a big grain of realism salt. While it’s awesome to hope-and-dream for more local authority over property tax exemptions and inclusionary zoning, these don’t feel Iike legislation that has much chance of passing in the current split-control environment. Can’t hurt to ask, of course, but don’t hold your breath. As for the regular portion of their meeting, Council will consider the three ordinances that would maintain or decrease the City’s real estate tax rate. Given last week’s announcement of one-time tax rebates—with six supportive councilmembers!—I think Council will quickly pass ORD. 2022-270 and keep the rate at $1.20. Tune in, though, and listen to the inevitable speechifying for clues about how each member feels about longerterm ways to easy the impact rising assessments have on folks with lower incomes.
Last week, RIC Today asked their readers for thoughts on a potential north-south BRT (Bus Rapid Transit, aka the Pulse) and every single piece of feedback they chose to publish was positive. How refreshing, especially when compared to my previous paragraph about Carytown. While GRTC did just vote to kick off the yearslong north-south BRT process with a study, there are, again, ways we could pilot such a thing now if we wanted to: Increasing the frequency of the existing #1, #2, and/or #3 buses; creating temporary bus-only lanes on the overly-wide parts of Chamberlayne; allowing the non-Pulse buses to use the Pulse lanes when they’re moving through downtown; and installing temporary rubber boarding islands to speed up stops. Setting the first suggestion aside, the rest are fairly cheap, quick, and easy to implement. Pilots: We should do them in Richmond!
Yesssss, Anna Bryson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has pictures from the annual Richmond T. Rex Run. I don’t know why this exists, but it’s great seeing hundreds of inflatable T. Rexes running around in a park—for a whopping 0.4 miles!
Via /r/rva, what are the best restaurants for sitting at the bar? I think this is a good question and agree that if you’re flying solo, dinner at the bar is almost universally better than dinner at a table by yourself. It’s mentioned a million times in the comments, but, Bamboo is the right answer to this question.
I know they do a lot of real and actual reporting, but the little notes from Karri Peifer and Ned Oliver at the bottom of the Axios Richmond email are my favorite part.
This morning's longread
A Shock to the System Is Coming. Which Party Will Be Ready for It?
Jamelle Bouie writes about the near-even split of Congress and what it’d take to shake that stalemate loose. Bouie’s always an interesting read, and I appreciate the historical context he gives to today’s stressful gridlock.
What changed things, then, was essentially a shock to the system. The collapse of the Populist movement, the rise of Jim Crow in the South and the nationwide suppression of labor cemented the grasp of industrial capital — working mostly through the Republican Party — on the entire political system. It would take a catastrophe, the Great Depression, to fully loosen it. I think we are in for another round — or two or three or four — of close, hard-fought election cycles with no decisive victory or defeat for either party. But something will come; something — whether economic or environmental or constitutional — will shock the system and give one coalition or the other the chance to expand and attempt to win hegemony over the political system.
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Picture of the Day
It’s good to be back at basketball games.
