Good morning, RVA! It's 30 °F, but highs today will top out in the 60s—bring on the warm weather, I say! I’m trying to get back to digging in my yard on the weekends, riding bikes without my toes going numb, and putting away my wool socks in favor of just not wearing socks ever. Get ready, because next week looks lovely—unseasonable, sure, but lovely.
Water cooler
A correction and an update! First, yesterday I mangled the members of City Council’s Education and Human Services committee. The correct list of members is as follows: Lynch (chair), Newbile (vice chair), and Jones.
Second, John Murden at South Richmond News found School Board member Stephanie Rizzi’s comments on the Richmond Crusade for Voters call to remove the superintendent of Richmond Public Schools. Rizzi gets at some of the important context that RCV has chosen to ignore: “Though there is undoubtedly more work to be done and a need for growth and change, there are conditions beyond RPS’ control that disproportionately impact our students...Perhaps the original strategic plan did not take all of this into account and did not do enough to acknowledge that addressing the inequities our students face necessitates an all hands on deck effort and that assigning blame without recognizing the complexities of our challenges is not a constructive approach.” Love that last little bit so much that I put it in bold!
Murden does a bit of counting based on some of the statements released by other members of the Board and doesn’t think the Tear Everything Down And Start Over contingent has the necessary votes to get rid of the superintendent. That’s nice, but, like I said yesterday, it’s exhausting to even have to worry about counting votes.
Just a reminder that we reelect all these folks this November, and, if you’re unsatisfied with your representations on the School Board, maybe consider running yourself!
Did I already know about the Newlin Music Prize, “an award given to the best full-length album from the Richmond-Petersburg, VA metropolitan area based solely on artistic merit without regard to style or popularity”? I’m not sure I did, but it sounds pretty neat and involves a community survey—like, for bands instead of for bike lanes. Take a look at the 2024 Newlin short list and make sure to add all these local albums to your queue. Because, listen, in the Year of Our Lord 2024 there is absolutely no excuse for letting your taste in music calcify to whatever was rad during your time in high school (although there is a strong argument to be made about the rare musical excellence of 1994).
This sounds fun: Axios Richmond’s Simran Parwani reports on FREEPLAY!, “Richmond’s first queer video game exhibit.” The exhibit is part of Diversity’s Iridian Gallery, is free of charge, and runs through March 8th.
Via /r/rva, this picture of pollen coating a vehicle...in February! What the heck! I thought we still had at least a handful of weeks left until the great pollening began.
This morning's longread
Rails to Trails recreation paths are amazing but it sucks that they take forever to build
Here’s a quick case for more rail-to-trail projects—when we take an abandoned rail line, give it a glow-up, and build a multi-use path right on top of it. We’ve got a couple of these in Virginia that you’ve probably heard of before: The Virginia Creeper Trail, the Tobacco Heritage Trail, and the High Bridge Trail. Locally, we’ve got the James River Branch Trail, which would connect diagonally across the three major Southside thoroughfares (note to self: that’s another one to put on my yet-to-exist project tracker).
Anyway, these are cool projects. Unfortunately, they often meet some of the same dumb resistance we’ll most likely see as the regions starts to build out sections of the Fall Line Trail. Fortunately, after these trails do open to public use, almost everyone ends up falling in love with them.
Honestly, I wish there was high-speed rail criss-crossing this entire nation to make travel easier for all, but the fact is we have thousands of miles of unused, decommissioned railroads all over the US, just rusting away, unused. A former railroad makes for an incredible recreational walking and biking path:
- Trains can't climb more than 5% grades so the hills are never too bad
- Trains can't turn tightly without derailing so any changes in direction are fairly smooth and slight.
- Train tracks are typically near roads designed for cars, but off-highway completely in your own world, just a few hundred yards away.
- In terms of cost, it's ridiculously cheap compared to common infrastructure construction projects. Most railways get converted easily with a strip of pavement laid over the railbed.
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Picture of the Day
The camellia’s are out!
