Good morning, RVA! It's 54 °F, and today looks amazing. You can expect highs right around 80 °F, plus a bit of sunshine. The rest of this week looks temperate, dry, and inviting. Your homework: Eat at least one meal outside over the next couple of days!
Water cooler
Uhhhh is RVA Bike Share permanently closed? At the moment, the website displays this message: “RVA Bike Share is closed. As of now, it is no longer possible to unlock bikes. We will provide further notice if the system reopens. We are sorry for any inconveniences.” I don’t love the “if” in that message, that’s for sure. Wyatt Gordon on Twitter adds another layer of doubt and reports that the bikeshare vendor, Bewegen Technologies, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Ominous. So if our bikeshare system is actually now defunct and a bunch of useless garbage, what do we do next? I hope the City looks at the situation as an opportunity, ignores the sunk-cost fallacy, and turns to existing, successful bikeshare stations as a model to follow—I’m thinking Capital Bikeshare or Citi Bike. We’ve wasted about ten years on an expensive, complicated, and frustrating model that hasn’t ever really worked for us as well as it could have. If Bewegen is no more, then let’s take the opportunity to start fresh with proven technology that we know will work!
I’ve got three City-related notes/reminders for you this morning. First, City Council will meet for their regularly-schedule meeting and will consider the Airbnb tax ordinance (ORD. 2023-151). Also, this is the first time that I’ve seen a Council agenda in English and Spanish! Second, you can and should fill out this survey from the City Charter Review Commission. You’ve got until June 21st to do so, and I will remind you again, but maybe just knock it out this morning. Third, you can attend a public meeting about the Gateway Pedestrian Improvements Project at 5:00 PM in Main Street Station. This project will “provide safer pedestrian access” to Kanawha Plaza from the surrounding area—which is much needed because crossing Canal, Byrd, or 9th on foot is often a deadly nightmare. I haven’t seen drawings or designs or anything for this project, so if you stop by tonight’s meeting let me know what they’re thinking!
Eric Kolenich at the Richmond Times-Dispatch continues to report on VCU’s now-broken deal to buy the Public Safety building. This weekend’s revelation: Shady (or at least not very proactive) communications between the developer and the City around issues with the existing building’s foundation.
Alert! High school graduations ceremonies will take place at the Siegel Center and Altria Theatre from May 22nd through the 26th and June 5th through the 9th. That means several thousand additional humans wandering around the Fan, taking pictures, and not paying attention to much around them as they celebrate important life milestones. Keep it in mind if you’re moving through the area over the next couple of weeks, and, if you’re driving, keep it slow.
RVA Bike Month continues, with just one full week remaining. Don’t worry, there’s still lots left on the calendar to slake any bike-related wanderlust you’ve got kicking around. For example, today you’ve got a neat opportunity to ride your bike and do citizen science, which sounds incredible. Join the Science Museum of Virginia at 6:00 PM for an Air Quality Science Sampling ride and help collect the data we need to create more climate-resilient neighborhoods—all while riding your bike. Neat!
This morning's longread
The Four Freedoms, According to Republicans
Another great column by Jamell Bouie, riffing off of a famous FDR speech and framing Republicans’ core values as four “freedoms”: to control, exploit, censor, and menace.
There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program. There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles. There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit. There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class. And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
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Picture of the Day
Is it summer yet?
