👃 Good morning, RVA: COVID-19 tests, safer streets, and an ironic bummer

Good morning, RVA! It’s 35 °F, and its gross and rainy outside right now. Unfortunately, you can expect the cold and the rain to continue on and off until this evening. But! The weekend ahead of us—which is so, so close—looks bright, crisp, and wintery.
 

Water cooler

While the CDC will not update their COVID-19 Community Levels until this evening, all signs point to another week at a medium level in our region. This means a lot of disease floating around in our communities as we head into the holidays and start spending more time with the vulnerable people in our lives. Remember: One of the best ways to keep your gross germs to yourself is to stay home if you’re sick, and, regardless of your symptoms, take a COVID-19 test before heading out to your next holiday party. To that end, this morning you can order four more free COVID-19 tests from the United States Postal Service to be delivered next week, just in time for the High Holidays. Even if you have a a few tests laying around, go ahead and place an order—they’re free and you will almost certainly use all of them over the next couple of months.
 

Yesterday, the Mayor held a press conference to talk through the future of the City’s streets, infrastructure, and Vision Zero—Lyndon German at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the details. I feel ambivalent about this sort of thing. Over the past six years, the City has spent tens of millions of dollars catching up on decades of deferred maintenance to our streets. It’s been impressive to watch—especially compared to years previous when other folks were in charge. That said, I don’t see the appropriate amount of urgency for making our streets safer as traffic violence continues to rise. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very thankful that our Department of Public Works staff has a pretty incredibly success rate at applying for (and winning!) long-term funding for ongoing infrastructure projects. But there are many, many, many things the City could do to make our streets safer without millions of dollars. We could allow neighborhoods to create pandemic-era “slow streets” (which Richmond never did a single time) or close streets entirely to vehicular traffic, we could increase the frequency of bus routes making public transportation more useful, and we could use cheap, temporary infrastructure to pilot tactical traffic calming projects. There are thousands of things we could be doing in addition to working hard at squeezing those long-term funding sources. So, yes, the City has come a long, long way since 2015, but I don’t think “we’ve applied for a bunch of money” is an exciting and bold plan to adequately address the issues we’re facing in 2022. What we’ve done is good, but we need to do better.
 

Something to keep an eye on: Tyler Layne at WTVR reports that a person incarcerated at the City’s jail died earlier this week. This is the second person to die at the jail in as many months. Reporters have started asking questions, which seems appropriate, and the sheriff’s office (which runs the jail) has started issuing defensive (and expensive) responses to FOIA requests, which seems less appropriate. Luca Powell says the RTD got quoted $1,385 for a payroll request, and Layne says “the Sherrif’s Office also hit CBS6 with a $1,000+ cost estimate for data about assaults on deputies.” Responding to FOIA requests can be complicated, and I don’t begrudge public institutions for charging reasonable fees, but I get to wondering when you start to combine investigative reporting, eyebrow-raising FOIA fees, and a failure to respond to reporter questions.
 

The roof of Richmond’s Fire Station 8 catching fire is the ironic bummer of the week. Originally, the City’s Capital Improvement Plan had allocated dollars to replace this roof, but maybe now insurance will cover it?
 

Axios Richmond’s Karri Peifer has a list of seven new restaurants for you to try over the coming weeks. It’s a pretty diverse list, too—Indian, Italian, burgers, fried chicken, wine. Take your pick!
 

This morning’s longread

The Blade Runners Powering a Wind Farm

The New Yorker has some really fantastic photos and videos of a wind farm in Keyser, West Virginia. Intense, blue-collar jobs remain intense whether they’re under the earth or up in the sky.
 

Five full-time employees maintain the turbines. Each tower has an internal ladder. After climbing to the top, the workers can investigate errant temperature readings—the gearbox can overheat—or worrisome signals from the tower’s sensors. Once a year, the team adjusts the calibrations of the blades, checks the tension on bolts, and tests the structural integrity of the equipment. Cleanliness is important to the successful functioning of such a delicate apparatus, and the employees take pride in their work. They often lug up a trash bag filled with rags, and use Simple Green cleaner to leave the towers gleaming in the sun. This is the first generation of West Virginians to trade work underground for work up high.
 

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Picture of the Day

A+ bus design.