Good morning, RVA! It’s 26 °F, and that’s a cold and appropriately December-like temperature. Today, however, you can expect highs back up near 50 °F with clear, sunny skies. Bundle up if you’ve gotta be anywhere before 9:00 AM!
Water cooler
Yesterday, the City’s Department of Public Works released public engagement surveys for two different intersections: Laburnum Avenue & Hermitage Road and 7th Street & Semmes Avenue. Both of these surveys frustrate me, and, once again, I’ll link to this Charles Marohn essay titled “Most Public Engagement is Worthless” and the follow up, “Most Public Engagement is Worse Than Worthless,” by Ruben Anderson. Here’s a quote from the former: “The meeting started out with the standard public policy questions planning professionals like to ask. What do you like about the city? What do you not like? If you could change one thing, what would it be? The answers were worse than worthless, and it was painful to watch non-policy people trying to answer questions that weren’t designed for them.” That’s how I feel about these two surveys, especially the Laburnum Avenue one. Do you, as a regular person with no engineering experience, feel like you know enough to decide between a “protected intersection with left turns” and a “roundabout with only one northbound and southbound lane” This stuff is literally my hobby, and I had to talk to three different people before getting it all straight in my head—honestly, filling out the surveys made me feel bad about myself! Which is ridiculous! This quote, from the second essay I linked above, gets at it for me: “We need to be more aware of different kinds of expertise, and who has it. Each expert—engineer, resident, or designer—only specializes in a narrow field, and we mustn’t ask them to do each other’s jobs.” Yes! Don’t make me, as a resident, choose between hard-to-read engineering diagrams. But do, please, by all means, work very hard to understand how exposed I feel biking through this intersection on Hermitage and why I entirely avoid biking on Laburnum at all costs.
OK, back to the actual survey options. First, you can see all the concepts for Hermitage & Laburnum in this one PDF. My preference is for 2A, a fully protected intersection. I think 3B would also be a good improvement, but I’d be nervous about folks flying down Laburnum carrying 45mph of bone-crushing-speed into and out of the roundabout. I’d rather cross against a red light, I think. For what it’s worth, I have no idea what the red bar labeled “95 % Queue” represents, maybe something bad for drivers? Who can say. Also, while we’re talking about head-scratchers, check out options 1A, 1B, and 2B which all eminent domain away people’s property. Absolutely wild to me that DPW would casually present an option that has folks U-turning into what was once a person’s front yard. Bonkers!
