🐶 Good morning, RVA: Bus ridership recovery, cute fuzzy buddies, and fresh fish

Good morning, RVA! It’s 70 °F, and today begins the hottening. You can expect sticky highs near 90 °F with plenty of sunshine—and this is just the beginning, too. Temperature forecasts increase to triple digits by the end of the week and overnight lows will hang around near 80 °F! You know the drill: Stay cool, stay hydrated, and make smart choices!
 

Water cooler

The Urban Institute’s Yonah Freemark pulled new data from the FTA’s National Transit Database to check in on post-pandemic ridership at public transit agencies from across the country. Would you believe that Richmond is one of seven “large” transit agencies to exceed pre-pandemic ridership numbers (Twitter)?? This is a huge deal! I’m shocked, especially given the ongoing challenges GRTC faces with the operator shortage and its impact on service reliability. The region should take these impressive numbers as a signal to double down on its investment in public transportation! Don’t delay, don’t wait for years to invest in greater frequency on the highest-ridership routes. Keep planning for big, new infrastructure projects like the north-south BRT, sure, but do everything possible now to make our existing service better and more useful to riders.
 

City Council’s Public Safety committee meets today and will hear a presentation from Christie Chipps Peters, Director of Richmond Animal Care and Control. Definitely flip through this PDF to see how much has changed for this City department over the last decade. Check out page four for a dramatic set of pie charts showing the reduction in animals euthanized since 2012 and page 10 for how the RACC foundation has 43x’d their annual donations over that same time period. Incredible. Shout out to RACC’s communications team who makes a lot of this possible!
 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Em Holter has more details on RRHA’s new homeownership program, including eligibility requirements. As we learn more about this program. I’d love to know how many current residents are are eligible and how many residents RRHA expects to successfully end up as homeowners.
 

Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports on a new TOD-1 rezoning request in the East End that comes as a result of the draft Shockoe Small Area Plan. The existing one-story, warehouse-y structure could be so much more, and the requested TOD-1 zoning would allow for more height and a mix of uses—adding to the growing number of apartments and amenities in that neighborhood. Looking ahead, I think we’ll continue to see dense(r) development creep northward toward the jail over the next couple of years. It’ll be interesting to see how it all comes together—good luck, urban planners!
 

Also from BizSense’s Mike Platania, the Yellow Umbrella seafood market will set up an outpost in Scott’s Addition, making it way more convenient for me to ride my bike to buy fresh fish. The owners hope to open the market early in 2024 and have plans for a restaurant, too, at a later date.
 

This morning’s longread

The Nowhere Election

I thought this was a pretty smart take on how the newly fractured social media landscape will impact the 2024 presidential election. I think political folks will find other ways to organize (old-school door-knocking done on scale has nothing to do with how an evil billionaire wakes up feeling on any given day), but certainly digital messagining will look different this go around. I’m excited to see who figures it out first.
 

The prospect of a Nowhere Election presents obvious challenges for any candidate: Without a clear sense of where audiences are gathered or whom they trust, it’s hard to know how to allocate resources or how to reach people. Social-media companies once gave candidates their own tools for end-running the “monolith.” By 2020, they had come to represent the corporate media, accused simultaneously, and often fairly, of both profiting from the promotion of misinformation and censoring too much content. In 2024, mainstream social media will have been reduced, in electoral terms, to being just another place to buy ads or for partisans to double down (not entirely unlike late-stage cable news). Campaigns will become even more like spam operations than they already are, dumping vast quantities of content, and money, into a discursive void. In the traditional media, fewer reporters will be working on fewer stories for smaller audiences, and candidates will have no obligation, or motivation, to respond to or even acknowledge those stories.
 

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Picture of the Day

Always Be Pollenating.