Good morning, RVA! It's 43 °F, and today looks pretty good, with highs in the mid 60s and no real chance for rain—it won’t compare to the beautiful parts of yesterday, though. Tomorrow you can expect, yet again, more wet weather, but!, after that begins a long stretch of what appears to be True Spring. Next week, prepare yourself for highs in the mid 70s and excellent chances of riding bikes through the forest. So sit tight, endure another wet weekend, and then get ready to slide on into spring.
Water cooler
Ian M. Stewart at VPM put together a good piece about Richmond’s Vision Zero plan (our City’s attempts to eliminate fatalities and severe injuries caused by traffic). To underscore how far we have left to go, Stewart talked to John Murden (currently of South Richmond News!) about how arduous and unsafe it is to get his kid from Forest Hill to Bon Air for school via cargo bike.
I feel all sorts of ways about this. Richmond really has made a ton of progress over the last six years. Time was, every dang bike lane needed to move through the entire City Council process, and so many people spent so much time trying to drag the smallest infrastructure projects across the finish line. Now, DPW will slap a new bike lane down while repaving a street, and most folks won’t even bat an eye. That said, we need to stop being reactive and start being proactive: Last year, it took the deaths of two students on VCU’s campus to get real, speed-reducing infrastructure installed on streets that everyone already knew were fast and terrifying. We could be doing so much more.
Luckily, through the multi-year Richmond Connects process, the City and its residents have done a lot of work thinking through what more we could and should be doing. This strategic, multi-modal transportation plan hits Council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee on March 19th, and you should definitely reach out to your Council representatives in support. The first—and critical—step is getting Richmond Connects adopted by full City Council. After that, begins the work of holding the City accountable for getting started (immediately!) on Richmond Connect’s very detailed action plan.
Related! The Department of Public Works will get moving on improving the intersection of Lombardy Street and Chamberlayne Avenue starting next week. This is just one example of many similar projects; they’ve been doing this sort of work—installing new traffic signals, vehicle detection sensors, and pedestrian countdown equipment—across the city over the past several months. I mention this one in particular, because just yesterday I wrote about the need to implement the quick, easy, and cheap fixes along that stretch of road as recommended by the Chamberlayne Avenue Road Safety Assessment. Of course the Assessment’s recommendations go a lot further than installing reflective traffic signal backplates, but it’s still nice to see some improvements made to one of our City’s most dangerous corridors.
RVA Rapid Transit, who I mention in this newsletter constantly, is looking to hire a new Marketing & Digital Advocacy Manager (and fill a couple other roles, too). If you’ve wanted to get involved—professionally involved!—in the advocacy for frequent and far-reaching public transit, tap through to learn more. You’ve got until March 29th to apply.
Reminder! Throughout the weekend, the A-10 Women’s Basketball Championship continues over at the new Henrico Sports & Events Center. Today, the #1 Spiders will take on #8 Loyola Chicago at 11:00 AM and the #2 Rams will face #7 Saint Louis at 5:00 PM. You can watch both on ESPN+ or call out of work and grab a ticket for $15.
Daylight saving time begins on Sunday at 2:00 AM and all of our clocks roll forward one hour except for the oven and the microwave. As a person who’s up before the sun regardless, the re-darkening of the morning doesn’t bum me out too much—especially when the longer evenings mean, potentially, a little bit more time to get out on a bike after the workday ends.
Also, as I was looking up how to capitalize “daylight saving time” on Wikipedia, I learned that they just call it “summer time” in the EU, and I think that’s way easier to remember.
This morning's longwatch
THE BEST DAY
This video by John Green is a perfect way to close out the week, refreshed by, as Val put it, just how plain good people can be. The Brothers Green remind me a lot of my own family: Val is much more like John—brilliant, thoughtful, and charming; while I’m much more like Hank—distracted by how interesting everything can be. Last night, I watched Hank’s video “Why Do Cars Suddenly Look Like Putty?”. I, in fact, already know the answer to this question, because I wondered the same thing a couple months back, fell down the same internet rabbit hole, and landed on the exact same Blackbird Spyplane article (a newsletter to which I immediately subscribed but then had to immediately unsubscribe because I am clearly too old).
Anyway, this video is from the John side of the house, and, just a warning, it may make you cry!
I don't need you to love football. I only need you to love something that brings you together with others whose love is pointing in the same direction. For me, that's football. But for you, it could be crochet or Jane Austen or distance running. But to be bound up with others, with friends and strangers alike, is the human condition. And to be in community is to be, for me, anyway, more fully alive. Of course, the game could have gone the other way. It usually will. But every once in again, we are reminded that hope is truly the thing with feathers. And we fall in love with the broken world all over again.
If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
Picture of the Day
Skyline views.
