Good morning, RVA! It's 40 °F, and today’s weather looks beautiful! You can expect sunshine and temperatures in the 70s that will straight up make you forget next week is Thanksgiving and that only 44 days remain in 2023. My advice: If you can find a chunk of time before the sun sets at 4:58 PM (!?), spend it outside!
Water cooler
I’ve got an exciting City Council update this morning: Today, Council’s Finance and Economic Development committee will meet to have some of the first public discussions about the 2024 Budget Season. Get excited, y’all! Budget Season is almost here! First, the committee will consider ORD. 2023-332, which would extend the Mayor’s deadline for submitting his budget from March 6th to March 27th. This would give the Mayor’s team an entire extra month to collect additional finance data and, theoretically, make tighter projections around the City’s income and expenses. Also, as the staff background section puts it, “introducing the budget on March 6th is early.” With that in mind, Council will then have a discussion about this coming budget season’s calendar. With any luck we should have the official budget timeline PDF in our hot, little PDF libraries pretty soon. I love budget season! P.S You can find today’s full meeting agenda here.
VPM’s Jahd Khalil reports on the record number of Black people holding leadership positions in the General Assembly after this month’s elections. He’s got some wild statistics, too. When the 2024 session begins, there will be at least 24 Black delegates and seven Black senators, this breaks the previous record set immediately following the Civil War, all the way back in 1869 (24 delegates, six senators). However, from 1890 through 1969—79 years!—zero Black people were elected to the GA. That ended when Doug Wilder and William Ferguson Reid, two guys who are still definitely alive, won elections in the same year.
Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams has a new column up about what comes next for the Southside after Casino 2.0’s crash-and-burn at the polls. You should definitely tap through to get a couple different perspectives on what folks feel like losing the project may mean to the City’s 8th and 9th Districts. However, almost every pro-casino, what-could-have-been thing I read laments not the loss of gambling on the Southside but the missed chance at multi-million dollar investment in the area’s infrastructure and neighborhoods. That’s something that definitely does not specifically require a casino.
Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports on some extra classic NIMBY opposition to an already-approved emergency shelter coming to Chamberlayne Avenue. City Council just approved the shelter this past Monday—on the Consent Agenda, no less—yet members of Chamberlayne Industrial Center Association plan on taking legal action because This. Shall. Not. Stand. I live in the area, these folks do not speak for me, and I’m grateful that the City—both City Council and the Mayor’s administration—has continued to work to find appropriate locations for these necessary emergency shelters.
Tonight, from 6:00–8:00 PM at Ardent (3117 W. Moore Street), the Partnership for Smarter Growth will host a “social hour & pedestrian update”—which, to be quite honest, is probably how most people experience spending an hour with me, socially or otherwise. In addition to hanging out with some urbanist pals, you’ll also have the chance to watch a video PSG put together “highlighting the challenges pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users face on our region's major roads like Chamberlayne Avenue, Broad Street, Midlothian Turnpike, and more.” This event is free, but space is limited so make sure you RSVP over on the Eventbrite this morning.
This morning's longread
Public Health Experts: Narrow Lanes Should Be the Default on City Streets
I keep saying that, over the past year or two, The Discourse™ around building safer streets has started to shift. We’re starting to see more studies, more national stories, and even more local reporting on how we’ve given drivers dangerous supremacy over our public spaces. Today’s longread is an example of that shift and points to a study showing narrower lanes make for safer streets (duh).
The study team, led by Dr. Shima Hamidi, PhD, analyzed a random selection of 1,117 street segments out of a pool of more than 7,600 in seven cities: Dallas, New York City, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Miami, Denver, and Washington DC. They cataloged design attributes of those street segments, including number of lanes, the presence of medians, and on-street parking. They then used regression analysis to test the relationship of lane width to crash rates, independent of those other factors. The researchers found a significant increase in crashes—approximately 1.5 times higher—when the lane width increases from nine feet to 12 feet.
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Picture of the Day
An art deco hello.
