Good morning, RVA! It's 70 °F, and this morning looks a lot like rain alongside some cooler temperatures with highs right around 80 °F. Then, this afternoon, you can expect the skies to dry out but that unseasonably cool weather to stick around. Get out there and get after it, because hot hot highs in the upper 90s return later this week!
Water cooler
This past weekend, Cat Anthony, Executive Director of the Virginia Capital Trail Foundation, had a great piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch titled “Poor street design, not happenstance, are responsible for pedestrian deaths.” I think this bit gets exactly at the problem and the solution: “Local leaders should take these gut-wrenching pedestrian fatalities as a wake-up call: Current street designs in our region do not prioritize the safety and well-being of anyone. Instead, much of our road network is designed for high speeds, which are far more likely to result in the deaths of drivers and pedestrians alike.” Our streets are broken and local leaders need to work up the courage to fix them—whether that’s by passing legislation to retrofit our streets with better, safer infrastructure, or by forcing existing staff to change their internal policies and procedures. Doing nothing—or meekly asking drivers to drive slower and pedestrians to wear bright clothing—is not a serious plan to save people’s lives.
City Council meets today for their last meeting until September, and you can find the full agenda here. Both the exotic animal ban (ORD. 2023-130) and the new utilitiy advisory commission ORD. 2023-188 sit on the Consent Agenda—along with a billion Special Use Permits, transportation funding papers, and other smaller items. In fact, Council has no Regular Agenda today, which should make for a quick meeting. One item of note from their informal meeting: Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority’s newish CEO will give a presentaiton on RRHA’s proposed homeownership program. This looks like a big deal, and I would like to learn more! We need to approach Richmond’s affordable housing crisis from every angle simultaneously, and making homeownership an option for current residents of public housing is definitely one angle (of many, many angles).
Welcome back students! At least students at Cardinal and Fairfield Elementaries who are part of the RPS 200 pilot program that extends the school year by 20 days. I’m sure they all feel a kind of way about shortening their summer and heading back to school before everyone else, but I feel pretty confident we’ll learn a lot from this pilot program and start to see it rolled out at more schools in the future.
Tonight, from 5:30–7:30 PM, GRTC will host an in-person open house at the Southside Community Services Center (4100 Hull Street Road) to discuss “the final steps for identifying a potential north-south Bus Rapid Transit route.” If you want to do a bit of homework before the meeting, you can read through this nice-looking 1-pager. GRTC will host one more of these meetings on Wednesday if you can’t make the one tonight, and will, fingers crossed, announce their final north-south BRT route recommendation this coming fall. That’s exciting stuff! Sure, I wish it would have happened in 2019, but, still, exciting!
Just another reminder that if the continual upheaval and stupid shenanigans over at Twitter make you want to permanently X out the tab, you have lots of replacement options. First, and probably best, you can start a blog and own all of your content instead of giving it away to literal evil billionaires. Second, you can join Threads, which, while owned by a literal evil billionaire, is maybe a place not actively crossing over a rightwing dystopian event horizon (for now). Third, you can create an account on rva.fyi, the GMRVA-adjacent Mastodon server (or create an account on any old Mastodon server). We’re definitely in a weird transitional time, and the fractured information landscape makes finding out where to get the best shoestring fries (and other breaking, important news, too) difficult. I hope we settle into a more open, accessible, and stable information future, but nothing says you’ve gotta stay on the bird site until we do.
This morning's longread
“Those Disturbers of my Rest”: The First Treatise on Bedbugs
It’s Monday, so here’s an essay about bedbugs from 1730. I think that tracks with Monday vibes pretty well.
Written by John Southall — the godfather of exterminators, known in his day as a “bug destroyer” — A Treatise of Buggs (1730) is the first scientific study of bedbugs. According to its author, this lousy presence was still novel in London, only “known to be in England above sixty years”. Its supposed source? The importation of foreign lumber (namely “Firr-Timber”) in the wake of the city’s Great Fire, which raged in 1666. Across this book, bug bites serve as proto–heat maps, pocking the skin of victims in proximity to imperial supply chains. “Not one Sea-Port in England is free; whereas in Inland-Towns, Buggs are hardly known.” In order to defend against the invasion of bedbugs that “abound in all foreign Parts”, Southall seeks out a wiseman where the parasites spawn to learn his ways of combat. Our exterminator finds himself in a kind of colonial fever dream: sick in Kingston, Jamaica, he has “lost the Use of my Limbs” through “a Complication of the Country Distempers”.
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Picture of the Day
Garden haul!
