Good morning, RVA! It's 14 °F, and, dang, that’s cold. Temperatures may eek their way above freezing later this afternoon, but that probably depends on whether or not you can find a quiet spot in the sun. Get used to this cold weather, because lows for the next handful of days will stay in the twenties or teens—remember to drip your faucets, add an extra quilt to the bed, and don your thickest, wooliest socks. Warmer temperatures return in maybe a week’s time. P.S. The entire region’s schools are operating on a two-hour delay this morning, so the standard reminder to watch out for random kids remains in effect!
Water cooler
Northside bike people and Fall Line Trail supporters: The City will host a public meeting tomorrow, January 18th, at Linwood Holton Elementary School (1600 W. Laburnum Avenue) from 5:00–7:00 PM to discuss redesigning the nearby intersection of Laburnum and Hermitage. This should sound familiar! Remember a few weeks back how the Department of Public Works included some bonkers eminent domain situations in their proposed redesign options? I bring the project up again, because the Fall Line Trail will almost certainly pass through this intersection and the current proposed designs, at least as presented by DPW, don’t really fit with the vision of a 10-foot shared-use path—something much more like the Capital Trail than the Brook Road bike lanes. Here’s Bike Walk RVA’s Brantley Tyndall in a recent email: “The Fall Line must be a 10+ ft. shared-use path. It can not be simply bike lanes split to each side of the road...Converting a travel lane to the Fall Line supports the vision already presented by the Northside neighborhoods. It saves trees, saves the sidewalk, negates any claim to eminent domain, and creates new space for dedicated and protected biking and rolling. The Fall Line should be routed as a single trail through the intersection, likely on the east side of the road, and that will change how the intersection is designed!” Unfortunately, none of DPW’s suggested designs for the intersection include this vision of the Fall Line, which...seems like a problem. So, if you agree with Brantley (and you probably should) fill out DPW’s survey and leave some comments along those lines, and come out to tomorrow night’s meeting in support of a better intersection and a better Fall Line.
Ian M. Stewart at VPM reports on Chesterfield’s new bus route, which just opened this past Sunday. I love reading these sorts of articles because they really underscore why expanding bus service is so important: to connect people to jobs. Yeah, it’s great to get as many people out of cars as possible, but the real reason for the season is making sure people living in more affordable areas like Chesterfield have access to a ton of jobs (like the ones in Richmond). Every time we extend bus service a little bit, we do a better job of connecting these two things.
Via RPS Superintendent Kamras’s email, a reminder that the school district continues to host public meetings so folks can weigh in on Dreams4RPS: Let’s Keep Dreaming, the update to their strategic plan. Tap through to find a calendar packed with meetings for you to choose from and a fairly open-ended survey to send in your own school-related hopes and dreams (which I’ve linked to before and you may have already filled out). New to me, though, is this 2018–23 Dreams4RPS Outcomes Report, which looks back at the original strategic plan and provides a nice, high-level view of whether or not RPS achieved the goals it set out way back in 2018. What a fascinating five-year period to try and implement a strategic plan, right? Given that no one could have predicted the last three years of this plan would be spent desperately trying to address impossible-to-foresee pandemic challenges, I feel like RPS did a pretty good job! Honestly, I’d skim the first few pages of infographics and focus more on the “examples of what we’ve done” section. It’s impressive that, with everything that happened—and is still happening!—the district was able to do even half of these things!
Also RPS-related, Luca Powell at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that a Richmond Circuit Court judge ruled that the District must release a report it commissioned following this past summer’s fatal Graduation Day shooting. The RTD itself sued the School Board to “force it to release the results of the investigation that it paid a law firm to conduct” despite the Board’s objections that attorney-client privilege covered the document. They must now release the report (with some redactions allowed) by 1:00 PM today—so stay tuned. I have no idea what to expect from this PDF, but I’d guess it’ll land somewhere closer to the “operational recommendations” end of the spectrum than “shocking revelations.”
Also in the RTD, a quick example of how bills die sudden and early deaths in the General Assembly—and how nice it is when Democrats get to decide committee membership. It’s a great change of pace from last year to see bizarro Republican priorities get shot down early and often, and that’s only because Democrats control both chambers of the GA. Voting: It’s Important!
This morning's longread
The Truth About Airplane Safety
It’s impossible to read this and not immediately wish we had the same safety standards for cars and drivers.
Both incidents could have been much worse. And that everyone on both airliners walked away is, indeed, a miracle — but not the kind most people think about. They’re miracles of regulation, training, expertise, effort and constant improvement of infrastructure, as well as the professionalism and heroism of the crew. But these brave and professional men and women were standing on the shoulders of giants: competent bureaucrats; forensic investigators dispatched to accident sites; large binders (nowadays digital) with hundreds and hundreds of pages of meticulously collected details of every aspect of accidents and near misses; constant training and retraining not just of the pilots but also the cabin, ground, traffic control and maintenance crews; and a determined ethos that if something has gone wrong, the reason will be identified and fixed.
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Picture of the Day
I spent this past weekend watching youth volleyball in Atlantic City at a casino. It was very weird, and I am very glad we didn’t end up with this sort of thing on the Southside.
