Good morning, RVA! It's 55 °F, and all of this week looks wonderfully springlike. Today, you can expect highs in the mid 70s and probably some clouds, and we may see some rain tomorrow, but, other than that, the week looks dry, temperate, and welcoming!
Water cooler
Luca Powell at the RTD talks with Kevin Cianfarini, “a volunteer with the local environmental advocacy group Beyond Methane” who travels around the City looking for natural gas leaks using his own high-end gas detector. He’s found hundreds of leaks and, according to records the RTD dug up, the Department of Public Utilities knows about almost 900 leaky pipes. Seems bad, right? It gets worse: “Last year, the city lost nearly $4 million worth of gas, according to purchasing receipts reviewed by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.” And then this bit absolutely blew my mind: “In Richmond, the leaks are also worsening. In January 2022, the system leaked 14% of all its gas into the atmosphere — the highest leak rate ever recorded by the utility in a month.” Honestly, it’s getting harder and harder for me not to see a death spiral in DPU’s natural gas future. As their gas infrastructure ages, the utility raises rates to pay for fixes, then more people transition away from gas to cheaper and cleaner alternatives, and the utility is forced to raise rates to fund the gap. As those electric alternatives get more affordable and available—sometimes even subsidized by the federal government—the cycle will only speed up. I know it’d be a monumental lift, but the City really needs to fight off the sunk-cost fallacy and start exploring how to break up with natural gas and get out of that business entirely. P.S. I first heard about Kevin Cianfarini’s citizen data journalism work over on rva.fyi, a friendly Mastodon server that you should join if you’re looking for a way to escape the ever more horrific Twitter hellscape.
Luca Powell RTD double header! They also report this extremely dumb thing: “Richmond is spending $300,000 in ARPA money on 120 ballistic shields for the police department.” The money comes from the Office of the Attorney General and is earmarked by the General Assembly for “community-based gun violence prevention programming.” You’d have to do a set of real complex and convoluted mental gymnastics to convince yourself that riot shields for cops have anything at all to do with community-based gun violence prevention programming. So while I’m sure the OAG is stoked to have this money spent on equipment for police officers, I think that Richmond’s actual community-based gun violence prevention programs could use the $300,000 instead (and, let’s be honest, the RPD probably needs fewer riot shields not more).
In maybe the only Open Streets project in the entirety of Richmond, the Department of Parks and Recreation will close most of Byrd Park to vehicular traffic on weekends through September. During the pandemic, many cities—including the tiny Town of Ashland to our north!—learned how closing streets to cars and opening them up to people can create wonderful, safe, and vibrant spaces. Let’s do more of this, and maybe not just inside of parks!
Sort of related, Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond reports that the City will make those pandemic-era outdoor dining patios a permanent part of Richmond’s restaurant scene. That’s welcome news as the “temporary” permits from a couple years back expired last week, and a bunch of restaurants got an email telling them to pack up their patios—which ended up just being a miscommunication on the City’s part.
Ronnie’s! Richmond Magazine’s Eileen Mellon has a quick spotlight on Ronnie Logan, owner and proprietor of The Original Ronnie’s BBQ out in Varina. Ronnie’s is delicious, and you should definitely make the trip out there to try the ribs. It’s right off the Capital Trail and makes for an excellent pit stop mid bike ride!
Via /r/rva, a rare thing indeed: A working payphone out by Mekong. How many of these can possibly still exist in the region? Surely fewer than a dozen, right?
This morning's longread
Hoogspanning!: More Dutch Safety Posters
Watch out or you’ll lose a bunch of time this morning scrolling through these (sometimes gruesome) Dutch work safety posters. I love the contrast between the bright simplicity of the Art Deco / Modern style and the messaging of “don’t slice your fingers off in the machine.”
Adrian emailed to relate this message from his Dutch friend: "The poster about spitting is quite interesting. In the first half of the 20th century lots of men chewed tobacco. And spitting was part of the chewing. It was unhygienic, I remember as a little boy the amounts of spit flying through the air! The nun is not a nun but a nurse in a twenties uniform. She is in the poster to indicate how unhygienic spitting is. Not a target!" But really, please don't spit on the nuns.
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Picture of the Day
Winterberries have the tiniest flowers.
