🚦 Good morning, RVA: Adding LPIs, a JLARC report, and FOIA details

Good morning, RVA! It’s 45 °F, and today looks a lot like yesterday, with highs in the mid 60s alongside some here-and-there clouds. Temperatures will start to tick up tomorrow and lead us in to a really beautiful weekend. I know it’s only Tuesday, but I’m already thinking about my weekend plans.
 

Water cooler

Yesterday, the City’s Department of Public Works announced that they will expand the use of Leading Pedestrian Intervals (LPIs) from 28 to 107 intersections. When an intersection has an LPI, the walk signals give people walking, rolling, or riding a head start before any of the traffic signals turn green. This lets folks safely move out into the intersection and into the drivers’ fields of view before the latter start zooming along on their way. LPIs are a good, clever use of existing infrastructure and do not require anyone to mix and pour concrete—always a financial and timeline plus. Paired with banning right-on-red, and LPIs give you a much safer intersection crossing for pedestrians. You can find the map of soon-to-be-upgraded intersections here, with the majority of those upgrades located Downtown, around VCU’s Monroe Park campus, and a few in Carytown.
 

Sarah Vogelsong at the Virginia Mercury reports something that every family with young children already knows: “Child care is unaffordable for the majority of Virginia families.” 85% of families with infants, 82% of families with toddlers, and 74% of families with preschoolers cannot afford childcare, according to the State’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC). Tap through for an absolutely brutal chart showing what percentage of a family’s income is required to afford childcare—an especially frightening number for families with just one adult. What to do about this crisis? Well, some of Governor Youngkin’s administration goes on record to push for reducing regulations as the solution, which JLARC pretty clearly says is not the issue. Instead the Commission points to consistently low wages for childcare workers, which leads to a workforce shortage, which leads to a decrease in the availability of childcare for Virginia’s families.
 

Tyler Layne at WTVR reports on a FOIA situation with the City that I think is worth keeping an eye on. It does seem a little crass to turn the story about a City employee killed while removing a downed tree into a story about FOIA processes, but a couple of the details in this piece definitely make me go hmmmm.
 

VPM syndicated this AP piece about candidates for the General Assembly facing questions about Virginia’s residency requirements, and it kind of blows my mind. I guess it shouldn’t, as we had a recent local instance of an elected official just up and moving out of their district thinking it’d be fine, but still! You should live in the district you represent, and, beyond that, you should know that it’s not too hard for the general public—or members of the media or, duh, the other party—to find out if you’re living elsewhere.
 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Em Holter somehow managed to sell her editors on a story about getting herself a new tattoo on this past Friday the 13th. I respect this kind of hustle!
 

This morning’s longread

Late pandemic

Is it possible for me to not link to a longread that mentions Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series? Probably not! As an elder millennial (see yesterday’s longread), I appreciated some of these points about our role in late-stage capitalism, which, turns out seems a lot like regular-stage capitalism.
 

The trick is that this doesn’t mean acting as if the end will simply arrive. It means moving to bring that end about. It means working to haul that wanted and possible future into the present, one hard-won inch at a time. It means forming unions and putting your mask on and making DIY air purifiers and sabotaging pipelines and checking on your neighbor when the block floods and a million other acts both large and small that center collective care. It means believing in and moving towards our own liberation, day after day after day after day. Or, to put it another way, perhaps the late in “late capitalism” isn’t a description of capitalism but of us. Maybe it’s we who are late—late to the work of building what comes next, of believing that there can be a next, that this isn’t all there is. Happily, as the saying goes, the only thing worse than late is never.
 

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Picture of the Day

Urban circles.