Good morning, RVA! It's 59 °F, and you can, once again, expect unseasonably warm weather as we spend a lot of the afternoon in the upper 60s. Temperatures sink like a stone over the next two days, though, and the highs on Sunday will hover right around 40 °F. Winter is coming (back)!
Water cooler
As of last night, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield continue to have medium CDC COVID-19 Community Levels. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 0 (?!), 164, and 122, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 11.3. OK, clearly some data reporting issues going on here. Despite whatever the CDC website says, there is no way that Richmond has averaged zero COVID-19 cases over the last seven days. Fortunately, which seems like the wrong word here, the hospital admissions rate itself is enough to push all three localities into the medium level. I plan on continuing to treat things like we’re at a medium level, mostly by wearing a mask in large public gatherings and staying home when I’m sick. One additional piece of coronanews from this week, Katelyn Jetelina at Your Local Epidemiologist has a nice piece about the practical impacts of President Biden ending the Public Health Emergency in May. I think, for most folks, especially those with health insurance, this change won’t be too huge of an upheaval. Unfortunately, the un- or underinsured—as always—face a lot of stressful unknowns and question marks.
The City of Richmond has plans for new bike lanes on either side of the Nickel Bridge, and they would like your feedback on the proposed designs. Check out the far right column of this PDF for what they’ve got drawn up for south of the bridge extending all the way to Hill Top Drive, which gets you almost down to Midlothian Turnpike. None of these designs include physical protection—like flexible posts or barriers—and the southern most section is just sharrows which doesn’t even count as infrastructure. And in this PDF (again, far right column), you can see the plans for north of the bridge all the way up and around to the end of Blanton Avenue. Again, no physical barriers proposed for any of the sections. I think y’all know what to do: Take four minutes this morning and fill out the City’s survey, and, when you do, make sure you request physically protected bike lanes as part of this project!
Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers reports the fascinating news that the City once again owns the decrepit Public Safety Building after developers failed to make adequate progress on its removal and future redevelopment. Sounds like VCU still wants to build something on (or around?) that piece of property, but the next steps are incredibly hazy. I wonder, since we have a lovely new City Center small area plan and things have kind of fallen apart, if it’s time to take a step back and rethink how we’d like to use that space.
Connor Scribner at VPM reports on whatever is happening at the Grace Place Apartments in Monroe Ward—the whole thing sounds like a mess and extremely disruptive for residents. Interestingly, RRHA purchased these income-restricted apartments a while back and have plans to renovate the building while keeping the units affordable. I can’t get a sense for exactly how affordable, but I’m really into the idea of providing at least some deeply affordable homes right smack dab in the middle of downtown close to good transit and jobs.
If you would like to vote by mail in the February 21st special election for the 4th Congressional District (aka for Jennifer McClellan), today is the very last day for you to apply for a mail-in ballot. Honestly that deadline sounds a little too stressful to me, and with the voter registration office opening for early Saturday voting tomorrow, maybe just do that instead? Check out the full list of deadlines over on the Department of Elections website.
This morning's longread
We May Not Actually Need All That Lithium
Electrifying everything, while certainly a necessary and important goal to keeping our planet habitable, must be paired with smart land use policy that puts more people in places where they can abandon cars altogether, dramatically shrinking their carbon footprint. Check out the map of Average Household Carbon Footprint and see for yourself how living in a city (aka a dense place where people can abandon cars altogether) shrinks carbon footprints.
When she tried to find projections of pathways with different priorities in the U.S.—where there are fewer and smaller cars, denser and more easily navigable residential areas, and more public transit—she discovered they hadn’t yet been modeled in the context of demand for these minerals. To do the modeling, Riofrancos and her research partners put together four scenarios for the U.S. to achieve net-zero emissions through 2050: a business-as-usual scenario, where electric vehicles simply replace the current supply of fossil fuel-dependent cars, and increasingly dramatic scenarios in which more people live in dense, walkable and bikeable areas; take improved public transit; and own fewer and smaller cars, while the government also implements aggressive recycling policies for electric car components. They then calculated the amount of lithium and other metals all these scenarios demand.
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Picture of the Day
A secret bamboo bridge hidden in a bamboo forest.
