Good morning, RVA! It's 31 °F, and we’ve got more rain and rising temperatures moving in to the area this evening. The temperature graph looks so strange—basically a steady, 30-degree increase between now and midnight. Keep your wits about you, and maybe batten down a little bit as some gusty wind could accompany tonight’s weather. The rest of the weekend, though, looks clear and cool. P.S. I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but check out Tuesday’s weather forecast on your weather app of choice!
Water cooler
GRTC has an exciting list of service changes that go into effect on Sunday, January 14th. Tap through and check them all out, because whoa. Top of my list: The frequency of the Pulse improves to 10-minutes during the weekdays (up from 15 minutes) and the #1A will now extend all the way past Chesterfield Towne Center to the Walmart further down Midlothian. A bus to the Chesterfield Towne Center! What a time to be alive! Also of note: The #5 will double its Saturday frequency to 15-minutes until 7:00 PM, the #20 improves from hourly to 30-minutes on weekday evenings, and the #19 extends to, checks notes, Goochland?? These are a whole lot of really solid service improvements! It finally, finally feels like we’re back to making our regional public transportation system incrementally better after years of pandemic-wrought cuts. I’m impressed with what we’ve got and excited for what’s next!
The Virginia Bicycle Federation wants a thousand folks to sign on in support of the pro-bike bills at this year’s General Assembly session. Yes, I know, you will 100% receive more emails after doing this, but I think there are at least two good reasons to do so. First, so many members of the GA this year are brand new and may not fully understand the scope and scale of Virginia’s All Powerful Bike Lobby. So it’s a great idea to make some introductions early on in the session. Second, Brantley Tyndall, Director of Bike Walk RVA, lays out an additional challenge: Get more signatures from Richmond-area folks than from NOVA people. To be perfectly honest, this second goal and my petty desire to beat NOVA at bikeness is why I signed on this morning. Technically, you have until the January 17th, but just go ahead and do it right now.
Jack Jacobs at Richmond BizSense reports on this year’s attempts to pass legislation fully legalizing the retail sale of marijuana. At least one of the proposed bills would grant licenses to “micro businesses,” interestingly defined as business that “have at least 66 percent ownership by people who have either lived for three of the past five years in a historically economically disadvantaged community or attended public school in such an area for at least five years, among other qualifications, such as being a U.S. military veteran.” This is a shift from some of the original thinking on these bills a couple years back, which reserved licenses for individuals charged with marijuana-related crimes. Importantly, pending a referendum, localities could levy a 6% sales tax on weed. We don’t stumble across new sources of revenue very often in Virginia, and we should definitely get this done yesterday. Unfortunately, the Governor, while not super vocally against signing marijuana legislation, certainly isn’t going out of his way to make it happen. We’ll have to wait and see 1) if any of these proposals actually make it to his desk, 2) if they manage to get at least a couple of Republicans to sign on, and 3) if the Governor would still veto that sort of well-supported proposal.
Axios Richmond’s Sabrina Moreno has a fun piece to help you get to know Rep. Don Scott, Virginia’s first Black House speaker ever. So how does Rep. Scott get pumped for the GA? “Scott said he's a walking oxymoron. Sometimes he listens to gospel songs like ‘Total Praise’ by Richard Smallwood. Then he'll switch up and put on Jay-Z. ‘That's my guy,’ Scott said. ‘And maybe, as I'm calming down and getting ready, I'll listen to some Nas. I'm old.’”
Via /r/rva, visual proof that the River was (and still is!) big and angry: A picture of the pipeline entirely submerged!
Logistical note! This coming Monday we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and, as it’s an official state holiday, I’ll be taking the day off from this email newsletter as well. Folks often talk about MLK Day as a “day on, not a day off,” a day when you can use your time away from work in service of some rad cause. If that sounds like you but you’re still looking for your rad cause, head on over to the Community Foundation’s website and browse through their big list of volunteer opportunities. Even if you can’t get everything together by Monday, maybe instead take the day to proactively schedule some time in the future to share your time and energy.
This morning's longread
Ten things to remember about public and private transportation
Now that the Commonwealth’s budget season has officially kicked off, here’s a good, short list of things to remember when discussing the merits of adequately funding our public transportation system (or, gasp, increasing its funding!).
- No transportation is completely private. Whether it's land, vehicles, fuel, air, research, wayfinding, public safety or search and rescue: you didn't build that.
- Most public transit used to be profitable. Most of the "public" transit systems around the world between 1850 and 1950 were built and operated by private companies, with large government subsidies. Some are still profitable today.
- Most roads and parking lots in the United States are socialist. And they're destroying the planet.
- Transportation policy can't solve race, sex or class prejudice by itself. You may eradicate racism from buses, but as long as racism exists, racists will find a lot of ways to use transportation to oppress people.
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
Get after it, my man!
