Good morning, RVA! It's 26 °F, but, don’t worry, temperatures should head back up in to the mid 50s by this afternoon. Looking ahead, deep into the extended forecast, and I can see some highs that will almost crack 70 °F! Does that mean winter is officially over? I dunno, but March is fast approaching and bringing with it warmer weather.
Water cooler
NPR national—like true-blue, regular NPR—caught up with local safe-streets advocate, cargo bike rider, and all around rad person Tara FitzPatrick to talk about the new speed enforcement cameras the City installed near Linwood Holton Elementary. Are speed cameras a magical fix for a street designed specifically so that drivers can hurtle along at unsafe racecar speeds? No, of course not. As FitzPatrick says, “A lot of us feel desperate...If I could make a quick fix tomorrow, it would not be any type of speed enforcement. It would not be school zone speed enforcement cameras. But that's the option that we're left with at this point." P.S. Setting aside my standard rant about journalism’s continued dedication to The View From Nowhere, I like how the oppositional point of view in this article is provided by a guy from “the National Motorists Association, a diver advocacy group.” I’m not sure I could think of an advocacy group I’d less like to join!
This afternoon, and sort of related, City Council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee will meet with two really interesting presentations on their agenda.
First, they’ll get an update on the Chamberlayne Avenue Road Safety Assessment. The Assessment’s study area, which is Chamberlayne Avenue between Brookland Park Boulevard and the highway, makes up just 0.1% of the city’s lane milage but accounts for 3% of the serious crashes. Further: “100% of the fatal and serious injury crashes were speed related [and] none of the pedestrian crashes involved an impaired driver.” That means the physical design of the street encourages unsafe speeds and lacks protection for more vulnerable users of the road—which is pretty obvious for anyone traveling that part of Chamberlayne for any length of time. As for recommendations to fix these issues, flip to slide eight for some short-term projects, which include much-needed lighting upgrades, no right-on-red (!?), and even a “safety camera program.” I’m pretty excited about the medium-term recommendations, too, especially replacing a travel lane with a bus-only lane south of Edgehill Road. Note to self: I really need to create some sort of tracker so I can monitor the progress of these cool projects.
Second, and pretty exciting, the Committee will hear a presentation from Planning Director Kevin Vonck on the upcoming rewrite of the City’s zoning ordinance. The long-awaited (by me, at least) process kicks off in earnest this year with the creation of a citywide development pattern book, a framework for the new zoning ordinance, and a framework for the individual zoning districts. Then, next year, the real rewrite begins. Double exciting, the Department of Planning needs a handful of regular folks to serve on a Zoning Advisory Committee that will report to the Planning Commission. If thinking hard about zoning and rezoning is something you spend a lot of time doing and you want to get directly involved, you have until Tuesday, March 19th to fill out this application form.
School Board will also meet tonight, and you can find their full agenda here. Of note, I’m pretty sure that tonight will be the first meeting for new 9th District rep Shavonda Dixon. No pressure, because the Board will also receive for approval the District’s FY25 operating and CIP budgets (that previous link should take you directly to a handful of budget-related documents, if you want to really dig in). The Superintendent’s current proposal looks to expand RPS’s budget by $38 million dollars, with $25 million of that coming from the City. I mean, we’ll see. The Mayor will, of course, take this into account when crafting his budget, which should drop in the next couple of weeks, but he’s not under any obligation to fund the entire (or any!) of that new $25 million.
Speaking of budgets, Graham Moomaw and Sarah Vogelsong at the Virginia Mercury have the state budget update you’re looking for this morning. I liked this sentence: “Although Youngkin told the General Assembly this January that his wide-ranging tax reform plan was ‘a package deal’ and he was ‘only interested in a plan that reduces taxes for Virginians,’ both the House and Senate have ignored those desires.”
Also Virginia Mercury related, the aforementioned Sarah Vogelsong will leave the Mercury to “explore other reporting opportunities” on March 18th and will be replaced by Samantha Willis. Bittersweet stuff! I’m sad to see Vogelsong go and hope she ends up landing somewhere in the region, and I’m pretty excited to see what Willis—whose writing I’ve linked to many, many times in this newsletter—has planned for the Mercury.
This morning's longread
I’m Thinking About CD Wallets
Old people! Prepare to reminisce about a thing that doesn’t really make sense any more and would be hard to explain to a young person. Young people! The closest analog I can think of that you’ll be familiar with is, maybe, your binders full of Pokémon cards. Remember the hours spent flipping through its pages with your friends? The feeling of deep sorrow when it was stolen out of your car because you forgot to bring it inside overnight? Yeah, that exact same thing but with “music CDs.”
Let’s take a moment here to remember CD shelves. Sometimes they were made of wire, sometimes of molded plastic, or sometimes of wood spaced just the five inches needed to house a jewel case. Whatever the material, and whether they stored cases horizontally or vertically, the shelves were useless to hold anything else. These shelves embody the dominance of the CD era and the hubris of the industry. Labels were selling millions upon millions of CDs and American homes needed specially sized shelves to hold them. No other shelf would do, and no other shelf would ever be necessary. Seeing a CD shelf now is like seeing Ozymandias’s legs in the desert. Look on my tracks, ye mighty.
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Picture of the Day
The forest daffodils are blooming!
