🫙 Good morning, RVA: Abolish parking minimums, RGGI shenanigans, and pawpaws

Good morning, RVA! It’s 64 °F, and today looks pretty good for the first day of September. Expect highs in the 80s, sunshine, and a continued drop in humidity. This recent hot-but-not-humid weather is wild—is this what it’s like to not live in a swamp? I mean, I spent some time on a bike yesterday and, while hot, I definitely didn’t melt into a pool of human remains when I arrived at my destination.
 

Water cooler

RVA Rapid Transit’s Richard Hankins has a good column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch explaining and advocating for abolishing parking minimums. Getting rid of parking minimums, which we should definitely do, is all about space. Richmond has 62.5 square miles of land and we will never get an inch more. Requiring a set number of parking spaces for both residential and commercial buildings means we’re prioritizing our extremely limited space for storing empty cars instead of building more stuff for people. As Hankins writes, “The mandate to include parking can increase the cost of apartments by up to 25%. That makes new housing developments more expensive to rent or simply not built as they become financially infeasible.” The City’s Department of Planning and Development Review just wrapped up the first round of public engagement on parking minimums and plans to kick off a second round (via focus groups) later this month. If you support getting rid of parking minimums and want to join one of those focus groups, email Brian Mercer (Brian.Mercer@rva.gov)!
 

VPM’s Patrick Larsen reports on the Governor’s renewed plans to pull Virginia out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. RGGI is a cap-and-trade program—something conservatives used to support as a pro-capitalism way of lowering emissions. Pulling Virginia out of the program is just another way Republicans show how unserious and unworried they are about the current climate catastrophe. I’m still unclear on how much authority Virginia’s Department of Enviornmental Quality has to leave RGGI without General Assembly approval, but maybe all the Youngkin administration has to do is wait out the current contract (which ends in 2023). Charlotte Rene Woods at the RTD digs into that question a bit, and, honestly, it kind of seems like we’ll end up waiting to see what the courts have to say.
 

Richard Hayes at RVA Hub has a very important pawpaw report: The pawpaws are upon us! Also, this important pawpaw tip from Hayes: “For the record, if hit by a falling pawpaw it does indeed hurt and surprise the living hell out of you. I speak from experience.”
 

Yikes, scroll down to the bottom of this piece by Michael Martz in the RTD and read some troubling quotes from Virginian’s Republican congressional candidates. I intentionally don’t spend a lot of time listening to GOP talking points—mostly because they’re specifically designed to troll liberals and make me angry—but when I do stumble across them I’m always shocked.
 

Today I learned that the “Guinness World Record of the most costumed T-Rex runners” is just 380! That seems like a world record in reach, and WTVR reports that the Richmond Road Runners will try to break that record at this year’s Richmond T-Rex Run on November 13th. I have no interest in running around dressed as a T-Rex, but I do kind of want to stand in the middle of the route as waves of floppy dinosaurs wash over me?
 

Here’s a headline: “Duke’s Mayonnaise unveils new mascot named Tubby.” Definitely tap through to see a picture of Tubby who has “shifty eyes and shaggy brows.”
 

This morning’s longread

We asked AI to create a bunch of cycling-related images – here’s what happened

More of a longscroll than a longread, but y’all know I am unable to resist hilarious AI-generated images—especially bicycle-related images.
 

Having watched the growth in this space, it got us thinking: what’s possible in cycling with AI-generated images? What would these AI platforms create if we fed in a bunch of cycling-related prompts? And would any of them be suitable for use on CyclingTips, say? And so we had a play around with a bunch of free tools: Enstil, Craiyon, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DreamStudio, feeding in a bunch of different cycling-related keywords. The results, we’re sure you’ll agree, are fascinating, entertaining, and, in some cases, more than a little horrifying.
 

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
 

Picture of the Day

Godzilla riding a bicycle in the style of an Impressionist painting, generated by the Craiyon AI. So good.