Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and today’s weather looks cool and cloudy. You can expect highs in the mid 50s as we (finally) prepare for some rain to move in to the region tomorrow and Wednesday. After we get through that, though, we’ve got some really beautiful fall weather lined up for the holiday weekend.
Water cooler
You’ll find Pine Camp, one of the Northside’s hidden gems, tucked away in the top right corner of the City. It’s a City park that’s home to a cultural art center, huge playground, hiking paths, and some excellent single-track mountain biking that I can almost see from my back deck. It also features a channelized stream that runs through the property making for some very beautiful but severely eroded stream banks. Over the last couple of years I’ve watched that erosion get worse, stream banks get steeper, and massive trees get sucked into an ever-expanding pit. Now it’s less beautiful and more just plain dangerous. Thankfully, last week the City started a project to “address unsafe streambank erosion and stability problems, while providing a healthy habitat for native plants, wildlife, and Richmond citizens.” This is a much needed project! If you spend time in Pine Camp, in the near future you should expect big, heavy machinery moving earth around and for sections of trail to be closed off. Please don’t walk or ride through portions of the trail that have been taped off—there are new, bypass trails that you can use instead. While I’m bummed that some of the views and trees I’ve come to love over the past decade will change, I’m thankful the City is moving forward on this project before someone gets hurt. Read more in this excerpt from Councilmember Lambert’s 3rd District newsletter.
When GRTC announced new pay and hiring bonuses for bus operators earlier this year, I started keeping an eye on the bus system’s monthly stats. I wanted to see if hiring enough operators would address some of GRTC’s reliability issues. It’s now about six months after those pay increases, and I think we can say it’s worked! Kind of! Check out this month’s GRTC board packet and scroll to page 49 for some operating performance graphs. For the last three months, GRTC reports an increase in the percentage of scheduled trips operated, which hit a low point this past June. As someone who’s been ghosted by a handful of buses over the past couple of months, I can tell you that almost nothing’s worse than when your bus just does not show up at all. However, it’s not all improvements: the on-time performance of the system has actually dropped since June, with fewer than 70% of trips qualifying as “on time.” Finally, flip to page 50, and you’ll see that, right now, GRTC has more operators than they have at any point in the last five years, and that’s impressive. More operators means more folks driving more buses which means more frequent bus routes, longer hours, and better weekend service. Just scroll back to the top of the PDF packet (p. 6) to get a sense for what kind of improvements are possible when the bus system isn’t working with a skeleton crew!
Liana Hardy at the Henrico Citizen has a really comprehensive update on Henrico teachers’ work to bring collective bargaining to the District. Last month, that seemed like a really long and complex piece of advocacy, but now, due to the recent elections, two School Board members have said they would support a collective bargaining resolution and three more might consider it. That’s progress!
Today the City’s Planning Commission will meet to officially consider adding the Shockoe Small Area Plan as an amendment to Richmond 300, our City’s master plan. The plan, which you can download and read in full for youself, is epically long—152 total pages!—and has been in the works for at least five years. If you want a quick overview of the plan’s Big Moves and Priority Projects, head to pages 13 and 14 where you’ll see a focus on getting the zoning right and on guiding the design and construction of a slavery museum campus. Also—FYI for Council Watchers—Planning Commission will consider a resolution to move their meetings to first and third Tuesdays evenings.
This morning's longread
The ‘Georgists’ Are Out There, and They Want to Tax Your Land
I’ve written about land value taxes in the past, and earlier this month the New York Times dug into the surprisingly strange history of where these taxes originate. Locally, at least as far as I know, Richmond has shelved its attempt to institute a land value tax. But! Next year we elect a new mayor and a new city council, and maybe with some new folks at the table there’s an opportunity to reconsider.
“I think one day I just typed ‘Why do the suburbs suck?’ into Google,” said Nia Johnson, a 29-year-old consultant focused on start-ups and consumer technology. The Googling led to a TED Talk on suburban design, she said, which led to urbanism Twitter, and to following various YIMBY accounts. She started tweeting about zoning policy, and then one day a social media follower said she sounded like a Georgist, which led to another Google search. “And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, yes,’” Ms. Johnson said. “Once you learn about it and understand it, you see how every almost everything about our economy and our society that is crappy can be attributed in some way to poor land use.” Ms. Johnson, like many of the new Georgists, fits a certain archetype: She’s young and loves cities, but she wishes they were less expensive to live in.
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Picture of the Day
Pine Camp in the snow, but you can see how, while beautiful, this is only going to get worse over time.
