Good morning, RVA! It's 60 °F, and today will feature highs in the mid 80s at some point this afternoon. We might could see some rain later today, too, so keep an eye out and your fingers crossed. Temperatures this week look great—get ready to enjoy them!
Water cooler
A couple hours after I sent this past Friday’s email, local media started to report that the person killed by a driver on Main Street was Shawn Soares, another VCU student. He is the second student killed this year on Main Street—a fast, dangerous, one-way street designed to prioritize moving drivers through the city as quickly as possible over safe speeds. The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Sean McGoey has more, including the nightmarish detail that Soares was just walking on the sidewalk when two cars crashed, going fast enough to spill off the street, killing Soares, and smashing into a nearby building. Wyatt Gordon has a quick video of traffic moving through this intersection (Twitter) to give you a sense for how the physical design of the street encourages racetrack-like speeding down the hill and onto VCU’s campus.
VCU’s president, Michael Rao, sent out an all-staff email about this tragedy which you can read here. The language is much better than what got sent out after Mahrokh Kahn died, and I think this part is worth quoting: “It is clear that major change is needed to the city streets and sidewalks on and adjacent to our campuses. The university is 100 percent committed to making improvements and is counting on the city to partner with us...We expect recommendations to include changes to infrastructure for streets and pedestrian areas as well as to traffic patterns. These could include lowering speed limits, extending pedestrian crossing times, adding traffic-slowing street alterations and more. VCU _will _ enact meaningful change to the city streets on and adjacent to campus through our partnership with the city.”
I hate to be cynical, but, we’ll see. It’s not shocking or revelatory that Main Street is too fast and too dangerous for people walking, rolling, biking, or waiting for the bus. It’s on the City’s High Injury Street Network and has been for years. The City has even kicked around the idea of converting both Cary and Main to two-way (Twitter), thereby slowing speed and making the streets safer for years, but has never made any meaningful progress to do so. In fact, here’s a long quote from the 2007 Richmond Downtown Master Plan underscoring that the City has known the Cary/Main one-way pair is a bad for at least the last 15 years : “The one-way street system was implemented in the 1960's, during an era when many cities established this type of system. There is no evidence that the system was created for any other purpose than the rapid movement of automobiles and relief of traffic congestion. The prevailing thought at the time was that allowing easier traffic access in and out of the downtown area would stem the decline of these districts and slow suburban sprawl. Today, many cities have found the one-way systems have the opposite effect. The higher travel speeds and convoluted travel patterns required by these systems serve to reduce walkability and the overall attractiveness of the downtown areas.”
I do hope VCU will throw their weight around and make meaningful changes to the physical design of the streets in that part of town, it’s something that’s been needed for years and years. But, I also hope that a comprehensive and systemic effort to slow drivers down and make our streets safer will not be limited to one small neighborhood in one part of town. These issues impact nearly every neighborhood and need to be addressed with a citywide approach.
Like I said, we’ll see.
City Council meets tonight for their regularly schedule meeting and has an absolutely packed agenda. Not only will they hold the official and formal public meeting on this year’s budget papers, but they’ll also potentially pass some of the ordinances needed to move the Diamond District deal forward (ORD. 2023-134), ban exotic animals (ORD. 2023-130), and end various zombie states of emergency. You can follow along with all of these papers over on my legislation tracking Trello board, if you’re into that sort of thing. Also of note—and related to the previous section—on Council’s informal meeting agenda: “Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Traffic Safety Concerns”. You can tune in at 4:00 PM to hear that conversation and to listen for any action items or next steps that would make our city’s streets safer for people.
Speaking of the Diamond District deal, Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense has a nice and comprehensive look at it and what Council will consider during tonight’s meeting. This piece is worth reading to get yourself up-to-speed since the deal has shifted a bit in the last couple of weeks to account for greater-than-expected costs.
Jahd Khalil at VPM has an explainer on Richmond Combined Sewer Overflow system, which regulars readers of this email should already know all about. Khalil, though, talks to unlikely river expert...Tim Barry from Avail?? I love it.
GRTC will host two open houses to collect folks’ feedback on a potential north-south bus rapid transit line. While the alignment has not yet been finalized, the study area includes “U.S. 1 between Virginia Center Commons and Chester, U.S. 60 from Downtown Richmond to Westchester Commons, and U.S. 360 from Downtown Richmond to Commonwealth Center Parkway.” There’s lots of good options for great and needed transit along all of those corridors, and I’m really interested in the eventual results of this study. If you’d like to weigh in, you can do so tonight at John Marshall High School (4225 Old Brook Road) and tomorrow at River City MIddle School (6300 Hull Street Road) both at 5:30 PM.
This morning's longread
Hollywood is the single best example of mature labor power in America
I’ve written about this before, but it still shocks me how spending the entirety of my adult life in Virginia has really poisoned my brain against labor. I am still forcing myself to interrogate the initial anti-union thoughts that pop up when I read pieces like this!
The stakes in this strike are the same as the stakes in every strike: will workers get a fair share of the value their labor creates, or will that value be piled up in the vaults of $250,000,000/year CEOs? It's not like the studios especially hate writers – like all corporations, they hate all their workers. The same tactics that they're using to make it so writers can't pay the rent today will be turned on every other kind of Hollywood worker tomorrow – and when the writers win this one, they'll support those workers, too. There's a lot of concern about AI displacing creative labor, but the only entity that can take away a writer's wage is a human being, an executive at a studio. As has been the case since the time of the Luddites, the issue isn't what the machine does, it's who it does it for and who it does it to.
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Picture of the Day
It’s blanket flower season!
