Good morning, RVA! It's 59 °F, and today looks stunning! Expect sunshine, dry skies, and highs right around 80 °F. I'm not sure there's ever been a better June day in Richmond to ride a bike around your neighborhood. Heat and humidity return toward the end of the week, so squeeze the goodness out of today while you can!
Water cooler
Good morning to me! After a single day of this, the first GMRVA member drive, I am 48.5% of the way to my goal of finding $200 in new monthly Patreon contributions. Thank you to all new patrons and to all existing patrons who decided to chip in a couple more bucks! I figure the rate of new contributions probably looks like a half-life decay situation at best, with each day seeing half of the previous day's total—so I'm sure finding the next 51.5% of my goal will be an ongoing challenge. Still seems achievable though! If you'd like to support the work I do each and every morning, and help me reach my goal, you can do so at: patreon.com/gmrva. Thanks y'all.
Lyndon German at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has an overview of why cities might want to paint their bus-only lanes red. I'm sure most of y'all know the gist—red lanes keep things that aren't buses out of the bus lanes, be it people in cars, on bikes, or folks crossing the street. But check out these statistics that German provides from San Francisco: "Red-painted transit lanes resulted in fewer transit delays, a 25% improvement in transit reliability, a 16% decrease in collisions, and a 24% drop in injury collisions. Bus lane violations fell by 51%." 51% is a lot of percents (see previous paragraph!).
I know we all know the housing market has jumped the shark, but every time I read about it I gasp a little. Tap through this piece by Laura Anders Lee at Richmond Magazine for some shocking anecdotes of houses having 96 showings, 61 offers, going for 45% over asking price—all over the course of a single weekend! Who's coming out on top in these ludicrous scenarios? Pretty clear from these sentences: "The sellers were able to secure a nice nest egg. They’ll spend time at their river house while renting an apartment in town to be close to grandchildren."
WTVR's Tyler Layne reports that on a recent self-assessment the RPS School Board Chair gave herself a perfect score at "driving the school board discussions that center around the impacts of decision-making on students." However, the Council of Great City Schools disagreed in a recent analysis, saying that at six out of 10 recent meetings, "the board spent between 0–10% of discussion focused on student outcomes." Zero percent is...not a lot of percents.
Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond reports on a $50 sandwich cake that looks extremely up my alley. I don't really know what's going on here but, I'm deeply into it: "It's iced with whipped cream cheese and topped with greens, eggs, shrimp and all kinds of other stuff, including a single snap pea placed just so."
People love baseball! I am not one of those people, but many, many of my friends are, so I get it. For those friends: RICToday says that the Flying Squirrels have made it into the postseason for the first time since 2014, which sounds very exciting. If you want to take part in the excitement, there are still plenty of opportunities to go catch a Squirrels game this season.
Note! Richmond's best and most beautiful pedestrian bridge, the T. Tyler Potterfield Bridge, will be closed today for routine maintenance, reports Richard Hayes at RVAHub. If you'd planned to spend this beautiful day walking across the river, taking it all in, you'll need to find an alternative plan!
Tonight, at 6:00 PM, Richmond Public Schools will kick off Phase 2 of their George Wythe Reimagined process with a community meeting. It took a year to hack through the horrible political jungle of actually deciding to build a replacement for George Wythe, but now that we have, we're onto the fun stuff: Design of the physical space. Tonight you'll get a chance to meet with the architects involved in the project, ask some questions, learn about the timeline, and hear about the District's community engagement plans. You can join in person at George Wythe High School (4314 Crutchfield Street) or stream the meeting on YouTube.
This morning's longread
Rings in our Solar System can come and go
Reading about space is the ultimate and perfect distraction for me during overwhelming times down here on our planet, in our country, and around our city. Saturn's rings aren't eternal and Mars might have an ongoing ring-moon cycle! Incredible—almost incredible enough to get you to stop thinking for a minute or two.
To think that Saturn’s iconic rings, which span the length of 27 Earths, would vanish in a cosmic blip is yet another reminder that our Solar System is a dynamic place. By the time Saturn becomes a pale hazy brown ringless orb, Mars would’ve adorned a cosmic crown of its own. Sometime between 30 to 50 million years from now, Mars’ gravity will break apart its closest moon Phobos. Its fragments will encircle the Red Planet. Remarkably, this isn’t the first time such an event would’ve transpired on Mars. A large asteroid or comet may have impacted the planet shortly after our Solar System’s formation, with the resulting orbital debris becoming rings and eventually clumping into small moons. Scientists think Mars’ gravity ripped the innermost moon into rings again at some point, and so Phobos might just be the latest product of such an ongoing ring-moon cycle.
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