Good morning, RVA! It's 65 °F and drizzly, but I think the rain should clear up early this morning. Highs today will reach a bonkers 75 °F—a full 30 degree warmer than the daily average temperature. Don’t get too excited (or concerned), because cooler weather—and more rain—moves in tomorrow, and, by Sunday, we should resume our winter(ish) trudge through February.
Water cooler
Richmond BizSense’s Jack Jacobs reports on GRTC’s meeting about where downtown to put a permanent, structured bus transfer station. They’ve got five proposed locations, three of which they call “high priority potential sites.” I shall keep an open mind, but really just two sites makes sense to me at this point: The current location and the old Public Safety building across the street (which you may remember as the location of the previous temporary transfer plaza). The others—a parking lot near the federal courts building and two Dominion-owned properties down by the river—seem too cramped or too far away from the Pulse. If the transfer station does end up in the same general area it sits now, I’m definitely interested in how it fits into the recently adopted City Center small area plan. Heck, if a reader wanted a research project: I’d love to look at examples of a structured bus transfer station integrated into a mixed-use building—not a parking deck. I’m sure they exist, I’ve just never seen one with my own eyes!
Earlier in the week, John Murden at South Richmond News stopped by a public meeting for the Crooked Branch Trail project and snapped some photos of the boards and easels the City had set up. This project, which I’m pretty stoked on, would connect the bottom of 42nd Street to the (planned) James River Branch Trail via a cool piece of forested property just north of George Wythe High School. Make sure you tap through to look at the “context map” that shows all of the planned and proposed bike/pedestrian infrastructure on the Southside. Over the next couple of years, we’re going to start seeing an actual network emerge, giving folks some real and useful non-road ways to get around. It’s pretty exciting!
PlanRVA, our federally mandated Metropolitan Planning Organization, recently landed a $1 million grant from the EPA to “support efforts aimed at reducing greenhouse emissions and other air pollutants.” Over the next two years they’ll put together a regional plan—and it’s a big, 18-jurisdiction region—to reduce what the EPA calls “climate pollution” (a term that’s new to me). To kick things off, PlanRVA, following the time-honored tradition passed down from our ancestors, would like you to take this online survey to help them gauge the community’s priorities across two main areas: transportation and waste. Filling out the survey will take you less than 10 minutes, and you have until February 2nd to do so. Maybe mention today’s longread in one of your answers!
I mostly link to this piece about the Fall Line Trail by Lyndon German at VPM for the classic “groundbreaking” photo at the top. Once again, we’ve got Famous People lined up ready to shovel dirt that’s been previously prepared for them (this time just in a pile, not a box). Did an elected official somewhere have a really embarrassing dirt mishap and now we can no longer trust them to successfully put a shovel into the ground? Are we worried about their shoes? Do I need to start a podcast to get to the bottom of this? Anyway, Henrico County continues to make good, steady progress on building out their sections of the Fall Line Trail, and it’s exciting to watch.
OK! Yesterday, I sent out the first Good Morning, RVA using the new email service provider, and I think it went pretty OK! I only got a handful of emails from folks who didn’t get yesterday’s newsletter, and, for most of them, I think it ended up in their Promotions Tab or spam folder or some other secret place. It’s wild how hard it is sometimes to actually receive an email you have signed up for and want to read! Anyway, please keep an eye out for further weirdnesses and holler at me (<ross@gmrva.com data-preserve-html-node="true">) if you spot anything off.
This morning's patron longread
The neglected clean heat we flush down the drains
Submitted by Patron Teresa. This is so cool! Cities all over the world are wielding the Powers of Science to extract heat from sewage and then using it to run municipal heating systems that warm a bunch of residential units. While building out a citywide heat situation does seems expensive, maybe Richmond can look into this technology for smaller uses while we go about updating our combined sewer system.
Tucked under a Vancouver bridge, an energy centre sits on top of the existing sewage pumping station so heat can be captured before sewage reaches the treatment plant. Heat pumps cool down warm sewage that's around 20C (68F) in temperature and concentrate that heat to produce scalding hot water which can be as high as 80C (176F), Pope explains. "What's really exciting is that our heat recovery system operates at efficiencies of over 300%, so for every unit of electricity that we put in to run the heat pump, we get over three units of thermal energy or heat out of it." Sewage is also consistently warm so heat pumps continue to operate efficiently even on cold wintry days when heat demand is highest – providing a constant source of renewable energy.
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Picture of the Day
Yes, I realize this is my entire personality lately.
