Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F, and today you can expect highs in the 50s, light rain this morning, and then some real rain later on this evening. This kind of soggy-but-still-cold weather makes biking and walking a challenge, and you’ll probably start to find me on the bus more and more this week—at least until things dry out.
Water cooler
I haven’t written about it before, but, over the last couple of months, Forest Hill residents have started to get heated over the plans to build a new Sheetz at Forest Hill and Hathaway. No one hates gas stations or building more car-based crap in our neighborhoods than me, but this development is by-right, meaning it’s explicitly allowed by the area’s current zoning. The City has put together this really great PDF that explains how by-right development works and pleads with the reader not to blame the City or Council for allowing yet another long-lasting, climate-unfriendly development on a piece of our extremely finite and limited square miles. As the PDF points out, the only way to prevent this sort of thing in the future is with a thorough, A+, progressive rewrite of the zoning ordinance—which is happening! We could, if we wanted, change our zoning ordinance to ban gas stations in the entirety of Richmond. While I don’t think that’ll happen (people are much more likely to oppose the gas station in their own neighborhood than the idea of gas stations generally), I do think we can make several good, sweeping changes to the rules that control what gets built where. Stay tuned for more on this process, especially if the Sheetz debacle gets you heated! While there’s not much we can do about this specific project, we can set out guidelines for development that hew a lot closer to our vision for Richmond’s future.
Tyler Lane at WTVR has an update on the fatal crash on Chamberlayne that killed a pedestrian this past Friday. Lane reports a few interesting things: 1) “data from the DMV shows at least six other crashes involving pedestrians along Chamberlayne in 2022,” up from three in 2021; 2) a nearby business has been hit by drivers three times, the owner of which was “alarmed, but unfortunately not surprised” by the recent fatal crash; and 3) the City has recently installed a stoplight on the 1400 block of Chamberlayne, where the fatal crash occurred, but it’s “not yet fully functioning.” I guess I’ll just keep saying the same thing again and again, into whatever black hole I can find: If it wanted, the City could pilot quick and cheap traffic calming measures on Chamberlayne today—measures that would be up and functional probably before the new traffic signal gets wired up.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch has put together a handful of photos of Main Street Station from the 80s, during its short-lived time as an urban shopping mall. I don’t know if this sort of thing would thrive today (probably not), but the current use—ostensibly an event space but mostly a massive glassed-in empty room—could be better! Also, I had no idea that the building caught fire in 1983.
Interesting job opportunity alert! The City of Richmond is looking to hire an Energy Program Manager to join their Office of Sustainability (which just hired its first director back in October). From the job description: “The person in this position will develop, facilitate, and implement effective, practical strategies to reduce municipal energy demand and consumption in support of the city’s stated energy and greenhouse gas emissions goals.” Could be cool!
Here’s a fascinating thread via /r/rva: “You have been hired by the city government to anger as many people as possible. You can, however, change or introduce only one thing. What would you do?” The most interesting part of this whole discussion is that the vast, vast majority of responses have to do with driving or parking. Weak! For this sort of experiment, you need to think big and like a comic book villain, so, if it were me, I’d evict Richmond Animal Care and Control (and all their cute animals!) from their current building, immediately.
Richard Hayes at RVAHub has a bunch of really great photos from RVAKrampus, a terrifying Krampusnacht parade in Carytown that happens every year. Shoutout to the person who’s dressed as either a horse wearing armor or a low-polygon render of a horse.
Today at 12:00 PM, the City of Richmond will host the first of three meetings to discuss the draft recommendation for Those Three Zoning Changes that have floated around for the last couple of months: Changes to the Airbnb rules, getting rid of parking minimums, and allowing accessory dwelling units everywhere. I haven’t seen the actual draft recommendations with my own eyes yet, but attend at 12:00 PM today–or at any of the subsequent meetings—and hopefully all will be revealed. Last we talked about these, I was excited about the parking minimum and accessory dwelling unit changes and worried about the Airbnb tweaks. More on this after I get myself some PDFs.
This morning's longread
Reading is Important to Me and I Will Prove It
Another wonderful read from Anne Helen Petersen, this one about the value of reading. How good is reading??—and reading real, substantial things, giving your mind a chance to turn an idea over, not mindlessly scrolling down or right or whichever direction.
For all the value of the skim (and it truly is a skill!) Wolf emphasizes what’s lost when the skim is all we do: we fail to reach that immersive, focused state, which isn’t just a font of understanding (the text, an idea, a theory) but of wisdom (applying or extending that idea to one’s life, layering it upon another idea, finding empathy for someone whose situation is not your own). Some of Wolf’s takes on, say, children and screens strike me as alarmist, but the idea that reading is never just about what we read, or how much we read, but how we read — it tied together so many of my frustrations with past incentives to read, and my own quiet fears about my ability to focus on the ideas in front of me.
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Picture of the Day
A bike runnel down on the Canal Walk! I’m pretty sure this is the city’s first and only bike runnel. More of these everywhere, please!
