🐢 Good morning, RVA: Diamond District Deal, get narcan trained, and infrastructure changes on Main Street

Good morning, RVA! It’s 63 °F, and today brings a chance for wet weather and cooler temperatures. Keep an eye out for the rain around lunchtime and, with it, highs somewhere in the mid 70s. If you can manage to dodge the precipitation, the day looks pretty lovely!
 

Water cooler

Eric Kolenich at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on City Council’s informal discussion on making Main Street near VCU slower and safer. You can listen to a recording of that meeting here. Sounds like a handful of traffic-calming measures are up for discussion, things like curb bump-outs, speed tables, and lowering the speed limit—all good stuff. I really appreciate Councilmember Addison’s push to not just focus on VCU but on the entire City and his request that Council make “bold, unpopular decisions.” Once again, I’ll shout into the void about my bold, unpopular decision: Some of these traffic calming measures, especially bump-outs, could be implemented this afternoon with simple cones and barrels. We don’t need to wait for concrete to make our streets safer and protect people’s lives.
 

Today is National Fentanyl Awareness Day, and it’s probably a good time to sign up for free narcan training through your friendly neighborhood local health district. Fentanyl is a powerful, dangerous opioid that’s often—unknowingly!—combined with other drugs and is part of what’s driving today’s opioid epidemic. It’s scary stuff. If you’d like to learn more, I’d suggest spending some time today over on the National Harm Reduction Coalition’s website, they’ve got a ton of great resources to get you started.
 

Quick City Council update from their meeting yesterday: Council adopted the Diamond District agreement (ORD. 2023–134) and continued the paper banning exotic animals (ORD. 2023–130 to a later meeting. They also adopted RES. 2023-R023, overruling the Planning Commission’s decision to deny approval of a Fire and Emergency Services training facility located at the Hickory Hill Community Center on the Southside. To unwind all of the negatives in that previous sentence: City Council wants to build a fire training facility at the Hickory Hill Community Center despite Planning Commission’s objection. You can read the City’s side of the argument on page five of this PDF along with some letters of community support, but…I dunno. Transferring property from Parks to Fire seems counter to some of the longterm goals Richmond has set out in various plans (like Richmond 300), and I’m pretty skeptical of the claim that the facility will cause “no adverse environmental impacts from noise or pollutants.” Sheri Shannon has some good arguments in opposition over on Twitter that you should read to get a broader picture of the situation. I’m not sure what the next steps are for this project, but, since it’s a City department doing City things on City-owned land, it might be a done deal.
 

Jonathan Spiers reports that VCH Health has paid $73 million to break their lease on the land on 9th Street where the decrepit public safety building sits. I definitely don’t understand what’s going on here, but former governor Doug Wilder has called a press conference today about it?
 

I missed this yesterday, but Richmond Public Schools held a school-renaming community meeting last night, this one for Binford Middle School. As with the other renamings, Binford’s Renaming Committee has narrowed their recommendations down to five finalists: Dominion Middle School, Dogwood Middle School, Fan District Middle School, Richmond Middle School for Arts Integration, and Unity Middle School. I’ve said it before, but plants and places!—Dogwood and Fan District are my top picks.
 

Reminder! Tonight, at 5:30 PM at River City Middle School (6300 Hull Street Road), GRTC will host the second of two open houses to collect folks' feedback on a potential north-south bus rapid transit line. If you can’t make the meeting, check out the one-page fact sheet and fill out the online survey (which basically just asks you which corridor you’d prefer the southern end of the BRT to head down).
 

Today, for RVA Bike Month, Pedal Power RVA and RVA Racing will host a “chill mixed-surface cruise on road and gravel” that ends at Amigos for tacos and margs—that’s a handful of things I enjoy on a regular basis. Also, I like when the cuesheet contains notes like “go over curb and into grass field.” Meet at 6:00 PM at Pedal Power on Staples Mill Road; wheels up at 6:20 PM!
 

This morning’s longread

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?

It’s the second day in a row with a longread about labor! Combining two things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, Ted Chiang writes about AI and its potential impact on labor if left unchecked—or, at least, if the people working on AI don’t stop for five seconds and think through some of the impacts of their work.
 

We all live in a capitalist system, so we are all participants in capitalism whether we like it or not. And it’s reasonable to wonder if there’s anything you as an individual can do. If you work as a food scientist at Frito-Lay and your job is to invent new flavors of potato chip, I’m not going to say that you have an ethical obligation to quit because you’re assisting the engine of consumerism. You’re using your training as a food scientist to provide customers with a pleasant experience; that’s a perfectly reasonable way to make a living. But many of the people who work in A.I. regard it as more important than inventing new flavors of potato chip. They say it’s a world-changing technology. If that’s the case, then they have a duty to find ways for A.I. to make the world better without first making it worse. Can A.I. ameliorate the inequities of our world other than by pushing us to the brink of societal collapse? If A.I. is as powerful a tool as its proponents claim, they should be able to find other uses for it besides intensifying the ruthlessness of capital.
 

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Picture of the Day

Still mesmerized by the red lanes.