Good morning, RVA! It's 29 °F, and today, with highs in the mid 40s, is a bit cooler than the last couple of days but still in the same ballpark. Honestly, I’m kind of loving this weather. I spent some time on a bicycle yesterday, and it was one of those magical times when the temperature, number of layers I was wearing, and amount of effort I was putting in all balanced out perfectly to deliver me to my destination only the slightest bit sweaty and smelly. Great for everyone involved!
Water cooler
Sports Backers has posted both the full, 94-page Fall Line Vision Plan PDF for you to download and add to your PDF libraries plus a recording of yesterday’s webinar introducing the plan. Why should you care? I like how the plan describes itself: “The Vision Plan is not intended to be prescriptive nor to limit the creativity of the agencies building the trail. Rather, it presents a direction the Fall Line can take based on the foundational principle that the trail is more than just a recreational facility. It is a place to travel, meet friends, enjoy nature, get to work, and explore the neighborhood. Users of this document should embrace the ideas that they like, expand upon them where appropriate, and be inspired by new ideas to transform their community. Above all, readers should be empowered to realize the Fall Line Vision in a way that reflects the culture and heritage of their community.”
Exciting, right?
After scrolling through the PDF, I want to direct your attention to three sections. First, flip to page 28 to see the key themes the vision plan tries to address—including sustainability; user experience in suburban areas; connections to schools, universities, and jobs; and, interestingly, that the Fall Line should feel different than the Capital Trail. Then flip down to page 44 to see how different sections of the tail could look or function based on their specific context. The plan sets out four big buckets (aka typologies) that these sections can fall into: Main Street Trails (Downtown Richmond and Ashland), Neighborhood Trails (Northside and Colonial Heights), Point to Point Connecters (Commerce Road), and Scenic Routes (“Reservoir Ramble”!?). Finally, skip down to page 68 to see what sort of fun things each major section of the trail could include, like, oh, I dunno, a “Lego-themed Gateway.”
I love this sort of document because it’s almost entirely aspirational and feels so light and optimistic. Of course that means none of what’s laid out here is set in stone—let alone planned, community engaged, or funded. But this document will serve as a guidepost to help us hold our localities accountable when they start building larger and large sections of the trail. Are they using the right materials? Have they thought through the historic context of the area? Will they commit to important connectors and spurs? When the time comes, these are the sorts of questions we can ask while shaking this document sternly at our elected officials.
After subscribing last week, yesterday I got my first RPS Advocacy Update email from RPS’s Director of Advocacy and Outreach—and dang is it an email after my own heart! There’s too much to good stuff in there to list it all out, but to give you some highlights:
- Check out this excellent Google spreadsheet tracking all of the amendments to the Governor’s budget that RPS supports.
- If you want to advocate for more and better support for public education during this year’s General Assembly session, RPS has provided some sample form letters and phone call scripts to get you started.
- If you’d like even more guidance, tonight at 6:00 PM, RPS will host a Fund Our School advocacy training (Zoom information near the bottom of this page).
Really great stuff, and, if this sounds like an email after your own heart, you should subscribe here.
Today, Planning Commission meets and will consider an exciting paper: UDC 2024-08, which would authorize GRTC to start installing a new combo bus stop sign-and-bench. You can see an illustration of what they’ve got planned in the staff report, and it definitely should look familiar to you because I’ve written about this sort of thing at least a couple of times over the past few years! Installing benches at bus stops is often either really hard (for a million complicated and sometimes dumb reasons) or actually impossible (because of how three-dimensional space works). Unfortunately, neither of those things change the fact that folks still need a place to sit while waiting for the bus. A solution like this, where the seats attach to the bus stop sign, makes it possible to put seating everywhere you can jam a post into the ground. Are they the best seats in the world? No! But can they exist? Yes!
This morning's longread
The Anti-Airbnb-Space
In this column, Anne Helen Petersen writes about “airspace,” the pervasive and lifeless Airbnb aesthetic and how it “sucks the place out of a place.” I’ve been thinking a lot about communities lately—both digital and real life—and this piece, along with another one she wrote recently about secret forest trails, had me taking a ton of notes.
The same was true for short-term house rentals: lake cabins in the upper Midwest might have had similar vibes, but they would never have the same tableware and light fixtures. But within the consumer logic of Airbnb, personalization is profit loss. It’s three stars. And as the expectations for what an Airbnb can and should provide have increased, more and more individual owners have handed their spaces over to management companies. Cue: more and more airspace. Standardization makes things “easier” — for owners, of course, but also for us as customers. But it also sucks the place out of a place, flattens every vacation into one indistinguishable voyage from one white duvet and stoneware coffee cup to the next...But now that I have the means to create it in my own space, I feel exhausted by [airspace’s] demands, unswayed by its cool charms. The bed is too hard. The mugs are too big. The only way the chairs and couch could be this uncomfortable is if no one had to live with them for any extended amount of time. If this is the backdrop of an ideal life, that life is boring as shit.
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Picture of the Day
Here’s a really bad picture of a skunk trotting along some single-track mountain bike trails. I decided to turn around rather than passing with a “on your left!”
