Good morning, RVA! It's 28 °F, and today looks chilly and cloudy with highs in the upper 40s. Expect more of this until Thursday when things warm up a bit. I know its early to already be thinking about the weekend, but I think we might get a good dose of sunshine on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Water cooler
Congratulations to LaTesha S. Holmes, City Council’s new Chief of Staff! Council officially appointed Holmes yesterday, and she starts in her new role one week from today. I think this is great news. The Chief of Staff position has sat unfilled for two years now, and I’m excited to finally have a full-time person in that role—and doubly excited to have it filled by someone who comes from outside City of Richmond government. City Councilmembers are woefully part-time public employees and having strong and efficient Council staff can really impact how the body works as a whole. Stay tuned, because with budget season right around the corner, we’re all about to get a front row seat to this new-look Council, with their new leadership and new staff. Fun stuff!
Not Richmond-related, but Virginia Beach residents will vote in a special election for Virginia’s 7th Senate District today. Democrat Aaron Rouse faces Republican Kevin Adams, and Ryan Murphy, writing for VPM, says it’s “the most expensive special election in Virginia Senate history and more expensive than 85% of the state Senate races held in 2019.” Why so much cash flowing into this race? Should Rouse win, it’d give Democrats a two-seat, Joe-Morrissey-proof majority in the Virginia Senate, severely diluting that man’s power and assuring the Democrat’s brick wall against any shenanigans—specifically around abortion or public school funding. Not having to think about Morrissey for an entire General Assembly session would certainly lower my personal stress levels.
Turns out, that’s probably not possible anyway as Mayor Stoney and Sen. Morrissey have already started public dueling over which city—Richmond or Petersburg—gets to host a casino. Yesterday, the Mayor released this letter to our region’s legislators reaffirming his support for bringing a casino to Richmond (despite it already failing at the ballot box once). Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch spoke to some of those legislators and they all seem...lukewarm...at best and, at the moment, hesitant to get too involved. I bet they’ve all got their eyes on the previously-mentioned special election in Virginia Beach, though. If Democrats lose that election and need Morrissey to go along with some important statewide votes, authorizing a casino in Petersburg seems like a readily available bargaining chip.
Brianna Crane at Axios Richmond talked to some folks about what 2023 will bring for the region’s housing market. Seem not great: Supply will remain low, sales activity will slow, and sale prices will rise. Not exactly what you want to see during a housing crisis.
Tonight, at 5:30 PM, PlanRVA will host a virtual meeting to present the results from that West Broad Street BRT Corridor Analysis study they ran awhile back. You can register for the Zoom here, or you can wait until the meeting is posted to their YouTube channel. This study/survey looked at extending the Pulse further west, past Willow Lawn, and I imagine the results will say something along the lines of “Yes! We should totally do this, but, dang, that sounds really hard!” Eventually, the manifest destiny of the Pulse lies in Short Pump. However, until we figure how to entirely shift the streetscape and make that place hospitable to non-car human life, we should focus on slowly pushing our rapid transit a few miles westward at a time. Adding three-ish new stations and a new western terminus at Glenside sounds great.
This morning's longread
Just "Prioritize Ridership": Is it That Easy?
As promised, here’s Jarrett Walker’s response to yesterday’s longread by Matt Yglesias in which he wondered why transit agencies don’t just prioritize increasing ridership over everything else. Turns out there are some really good, equity-based reasons why a city may want to focus on providing access to public transit—even if it’s infrequent and ultimately serves fewer riders—to as many people as possible.
The suburbanization of poverty in many cities has increased the number of low-income people and people of color living in suburban land use patterns that are just inimical to public transit. Those areas have fast roads that are unsafe to cross, no sidewalks, disconnected street patterns that obstruct walks to the stop, road patterns that require buses to make crazy loops, etc. A strictly ridership-based approach would not go to a lot of those places, but will put lots of service in dense inner cities that happen to be increasingly gentrified. The result can be something that is measurably inequitable by both race and income. In other words, sometimes, in some common geographies, there’s a ridership vs equity tradeoff.
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Picture of the Day
Bamboo is terrifying and will grow anywhere.
