Good morning, RVA! It's 61 °F, and today looks legitimately hot! Expect highs in the upper 80s, followed by a chance for rain tomorrow, and then—to round out the weekend—a pretty excellent spring Sunday. Enjoy, stay hydrated, and find some time for yourself if you can!
Water cooler
The Richmond Police Department reports that a person was hit and killed by a driver early in the morning this past Wednesday on the 5200 block of Orcutt Lane in the City’s 9th District. First, the driver did not stop, so if you have any information you can call the RPD’s Crash Team Investigator at 804.646.1369. Second, while Orcutt Lane is not part of the City’s High Injury Street Network, at least two other people have been seriously injured or killed on that same stretch of road (it’s hard to tell for sure given the quality of this map, see below). Third, this is a chance for the Mayor and City Council to show that they can and will respond to traffic violence throughout the City—not just north of the river, not just when one of the partners involved is a tremendously powerful university, and not just when the victim was well-known and well-connected.
Ben Paviour at VPM reports on the Governor pulling Virginia from the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which states created to improve accuracy of voter rolls. I mean, whatever, classic Republican dumb stuff. What I think is more interesting than what’s actually happening with ERIC is the brutally honest tone Paviour takes while covering this Republican dumb stuff. It’s definitely a step towards what we need from news organizations as we head into the 2024 presidential elections and leaves me with a little hope—especially given what I’ve seen from CNN over the past few days (Twitter).
Em Holter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that an employee of Richmond’s Department of Public Works set up fake companies and awarded herself and her friends with government contracts, costing the City between $150,000 and $250,000. She pleaded guilty this week and faces up to 20 years in prison. You can aslo read Council President Jones’s statement of thanks to the Office of Inspector General for surfacing this whole situation. Now what I’d like to hear is who else at DPW knew about this and for how long.
In the next couple of weeks, the City will turn on the newly installed Pedestrian Hybrid Beacons at Huguenot High School, Fonticello Park, and Holton Elementary School. PHBs are actual mid-block red lights that drivers must stop at to allow pedestrians to cross safely—they’re kind of like the lights you see out front of a fire station that only activate when a fire truck needs to zoom off somewhere. Tap through to the City’s page explaining how these rare-ish traffic signals work so you know how to safely navigate them if you drive in these areas.
Important reminder! VCU and VUU will both host their commencements tomorrow morning! This means lots of people on both campuses, lots of parents and students wandering around with big smiles on their faces probably not paying attention to their surroundings, and lots of people packed into restaurants for celebratory dinners. Keep it in mind if you’ve got plans tomorrow—especially in the Fan.
We’ve got a big RVA Bike Month weekend looming ahead of us, and I hope you’ll find at least one opportunity to, as a famous man once said, get on your bike and ride! Tonight, at Stone Brewing, you can learn how to get rad with a beginner lesson in mountain biking around the James River; on Sunday you’ve got the Railroad and Canal History Ride (that’s trains, boats, and bikes!), the Crossings of the James History Ride, and the Väsen Women’s Ride; and, of course, throughout the weekend, various iterations of the Cap2Cap.
This morning's longread
American Road Deaths Show an Alarming Racial Gap
Have we disaggregated Richmond’s traffic violence data by race? Do we even collect that information? Does the City make the High Injury Street Network available as a GIS layer so folks can do this type of research? Good data can be so important to good advocacy!
A study published last year by Harvard and Boston University deepened our understanding of this phenomenon by controlling for the distance traveled by different racial groups when driving, walking or riding a bicycle. It found that Black people were more than twice as likely, for each mile walked, to be struck and killed by a vehicle as white pedestrians. For Black cyclists, the fatality risk per mile was 4.5 times as high as that for white cyclists. For Hispanic walkers and bikers, the death rates were 1.5 and 1.7 times as high as those for white Americans using the same modes of transportation.
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Picture of the Day
Richmond-famous mural man doing some work on the Northside!
