9️⃣ Good morning, RVA: New Councilmember, ban right on red, and a lot of gingerbread

Good morning, RVA! It’s 27 °F, and today you can expect clear skies and highs right around 50 °F. I think this weather for sure qualifies as “brisk,” and I’m excited to clap my hands together and say “Woo! It’s brisk out there!” every time I enter a building for the next several weeks.
 

Water cooler

Big news! Last night, City Council voted unanimously to appoint Nicole Jones as the 9th District’s interim councilmember. Jones—no relation to the Jones she’s replacing—served as the 9th’s representative on the School Board for the last few of years and will officially shift over to Council in early January. Just like everyone else on City Council, Jones will face reelection this coming November (assuming she wants to stay on Council for a new, full term). School Board’s press release mentions that they’ve now got 45 days to select a replacement and will have more details forthcoming, so it doesn’t sound like Jones will stick around and serve on both bodies (which, honestly, sounds exhausting). No ifs ands or buts: That’s going to be a tough role to fill given the School Board’s general vibes and toxic workplace culture. Stay tuned for more information on how they’ll go about appointing a replacement and if it will impact their regular business—like the budget they need to pass in the next little while. Anyway, welcome to City Council, Councilmember Jones (…well that’s going to be confusing, isn’t it?)!
 

One other City Council update—they adopted all three papers I had my eye on: the tweaks to the Urban Forestry Commission (ORD. 2023–331), pushing the Mayor’s due date for the budget back a a few weeks to March 27th (ORD. 2023–332), and asking the General Assembly to approve the less chunky changes to the City’s Charter (RES. 2023-R057).
 

Samuel B. Parker at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that a driver hit a person in the crosswalk while turning right on red, from Harrison Street onto Broad Street. The pedestrian suffered life-threatening injuries and was taken to the hospital. I don’t know if the City has put up the “NO RIGHT TURN ON RED” signs at that particular intersection yet, but doing so was one of the recommendations in VCU’s Pedestrian Safety Study they released this past fall. Right turns on red are dangerous because drivers are often so concerned with looking left for oncoming traffic they never even look right—the direction in which their car is moving and where folks might be walking! We could make the city safer if we wholesale banned rights on red, and I’d love for someone on City Council to pick this up next year.
 

Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond reports that UR just released the third update to its Mapping Inequality project—the reason why we have such great digital versions of all those redlining maps. Tap through to learn about the project’s updated features, new introductions from scholars, and additional maps from new cities.
 

WRIC’s Kassidy Hammond reports that the Jefferson’s gingerbread display—which is an annual thing that I am just now learning about—contains over 550 pounds of gingerbread and 100 pounds of marshmallows. Marshmallows don’t weigh at ton, so I would love to see what 100 pounds of them look like all piled up in a room somewhere.
 

This morning’s longread

Privacy first

I liked this Cory Doctorow essay on internet privacy and how focusing on more and better privacy laws gets us better protection from all sorts of things—things that a surprisingly broad coalition of people care about. This piece helps answer the first question most people ask when I talk about this stuff: “I’m not doing anything on the internet that I don’t want folks to know about. Why should I care?”
 

Worried your kid is being made miserable through targeted ads? No surveillance, no targeting. Worried your uncle was turned into a Qanon by targeted disinformation? No surveillance, no targeting. Worried that racialized people are being targeted for discriminatory hiring or lending by algorithms? No surveillance, no targeting. Worried that nation-state actors are exploiting surveillance data to attack elections, politicians, or civil servants? No surveillance, no surveillance data. Worried that AI is being trained on your personal data? No surveillance, no training data. Worried that the news is being killed by monopolists who exploit the advantage conferred by surveillance ads to cream 51% off every ad-dollar? No surveillance, no surveillance ads. Worried that social media giants maintain their monopolies by filling up commercial moats with surveillance data? No surveillance, no surveillance moat.
 

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Picture of the Day

So freaking jealous of this Messy Light Situation in the Fan.