Good morning, RVA! It's 45 °F, and today looks like the chilliest day of the week. You can expect cloudy highs right around 60 °F, but I’m hoping to squeeze a couple more degrees out of the day because I’ve got big back-deck plans this evening. Either way, warmer temperatures start to return tomorrow, and next week looks pretty excellent.
Water cooler
VPM’s Jahd Khalil reports that this past Monday, the City’s Planing Commission signed off on the land transfer needed to finalize the Diamond District deal. Khalil also reports on a few changes to the deal that will help cover the now larger-than-anticipated costs as the project’s timeline has slipped and as interest rates have climbed. Specifically, the size of the TIF district has grown a bit, but not even close to the size of the all encompassing Big TIF from the Navy Hill days, and the City will “now be responsible for the public infrastructure in the first phase of the project's four phases, at a cost of $54 million.” I’d love if someone put together a table of these recent changes so I could get a feel for their scope. I totally get the need to cover increasing costs, but I would like a better way of understanding what those new costs are and how the project expects to pay for them. Maybe this exists somewhere?
Zach Joachim at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the pedestrian bridge to Texas Beach will remain closed for at least another year. It’s kind of charming, in a dirty Richmond way, that folks keep prying off the barricades that prevent people from using the bridge, but, seriously, you should not do this! You will never ever catch me crossing a canal and a set of train tracks on a decades-old, “structurally unsafe” span! The multi-year delay in reopening Texas Beach to the public is a huge bummer, of course, but it’s far less of a bummer than if people got seriously injured by an old bridge giving up the ghost and dumping people into the canal.
The Richmond Office of Elections is hosting a fun contest to design the city’s next “I VOTED” sticker. Any Richmond Public High School student can submit a design, and the rules are pretty limited, leaving artists with a lot of room to work—just a two inch circle, no more than four colors, and some phrase about voting. Surely someone out there has a way better idea than a generic “I VOTED” pasted on top of an American flag illustration! Spread the word to the most artistic young people in your life, and let them know entries are due by May 12th.
Who do you contact if you’ve got a vaguely municipal-related problem? If it’s not an emergency, do you call DPU? Dominion? The non-emergency police number? Ghostbusters? Someone else? The City’s Department of Citizen Service and Response has put together this nice graphic about who to call for what, and it’s something that you should stick on your digital fridge (or maybe print out and stick on your actual fridge). I think my takeaway from this graphic is don’t call the police unless it’s an emergency, and, when in doubt, call 3-1-1 (or submit a ticket online at rva311.com).
Quick Bike Month reminder: Today is Bike to School Day, so if you’re out in a car this morning or this afternoon, please keep an eye out for an extra helping of kids on bikes! Also, tonight you can stop by Basic City Beer (212 W. 6th Street) from 5:00–7:00 PM for an Urbanism Happy Hour focused on the proposed/impending Fall Line Trail. Bike Month continues!
Hey, in case you missed it yesterday, I set up a Mastodon server over on rva.fyi. If you’re looking to say goodbye to Twitter, but aren’t yet sure how to do a Mastodon, maybe tap through and give it a whirl!
This morning's longread
Hoboken leader shares secret sauce for vision zero success
Hoboken, which surprisingly leads the nation in Vision Zero work, has had incredible success using cheap, temporary materials to pilot transportation infrastructure projects. If only we had the same “So let’s try it. Let’s see if it works.” attitude in Richmond!
The lack of city funds for transportation projects at the outset meant Sharp and his team had to be very efficient and stick to the basics: A few cones in the middle of the street acted as a mini-roundabout; Two plastic delineator wands at a corner to prevent parking and “daylight” the intersection; bike racks in the street to encourage cycling. They also had to be cognizant of the public pushback against change. “A lot of the things that are in [our bike and pedestrian plan] are things that hadn’t happened in Hoboken before, like creating a citywide bicycle network. So Sharp leaned heavily on pilot projects. “They’ve been devastatingly effective,” he said, in large part because they disarm people who might have concerns: “You may not believe bike lanes are needed. You may not believe you need to build out curb extensions, to shorten a pedestrian crossing distance or make it easier for people of all ages and abilities to cross the street safely. You may not believe we have the ability to even implement a project like that because of the distrust, and so forth that had been permeating the community for some time. So let’s try it. Let’s see if it works.”
If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
Picture of the Day
I bought this sticker, but, like, do I put it on our car?
