🥵 Good morning, RVA: Early in-person voting restrictions, rattlesnakes, and bus shelters

Good morning, RVA! It’s 75 °F, and we’ll most likely end up with triple digit highs today. Pile on the humidity and you’ve got a dangerous heat situation, giving you every reason to stay inside with the blinds drawn like some sort of handsome 18th Century vampire. Seriously though, with a Heat Advisory in effect until at least tomorrow, today is a good day to embrace the darkness.
 

Water cooler

Yesterday, the Electoral Board of the City of Richmond voted to restrict early in-person voting in this November’s election to their incredibly hard to reach location at the end of Laburnum Avenue. Practically, this decision limits early in-person voting exclusively to people who can drive or get a ride to the Office of Elections, as their location is almost entirely inaccessible by foot, bike, or bus. This continues a recent trend: As the city has emerged from the pandemic, satellite early voting locations have mostly vanished—which is a real bummer. Axios Richmond has more and reports that the Board “balked at the $100,000 cost of staffing the [satellite] offices.” What I recommend, and what I do myself, is to sign up for permanent absentee voter status. Every election, the Department of Elections just mails my ballot ahead of time without me having to do a single thing. It’s so easy and convenient, and I love it.
 

Axios Richmond also pointed me to this story in the Washington Post about the Virginia High School League deciding not to implement the Governor’s new anti-trans policies in high school sports. Of course, local school districts are free to follow the new policies, but it doesn’t sound like VHSL, which regulates these sorts of things, will do any top-down, statewide enforcement beyond their own existing policy (which is maybe too intense).
 

Luca Powell at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports some interesting data on Virginia’s “Don’t Tread on Me” license plate: “In 2014, DMV data show around 38,000 of the plates in circulation. Today, the number is more than 97,000. At a cost of $10 per plate, they generate a gross revenue of $970,000 for the DMV.” I appreciate that Powell also spoke to a professor of American history, who said the Gadsden Flag, on which the license plate is based, is “not yet at the level of a Confederate flag, but it’s on its way there.” Personally, when I see a yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” plate out on the road, especially while on a bike, I tense up and start looking for ways to avoid the driver—just like I would a rattlesnake. I guess that’s the intention, and I think that is really sad.
 

Today at 12:00 PM, RVA Rapid Transit will host a virtual Transit Talk about Bus Shelter Bureaucracy featuring Alan Saunders from the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation. Saunders will answer a bunch of questions about bus shelters that I hear folks ask constantly: “Getting bus shelters installed in this state is too dang hard. Why is that? Can we change it? Where do we begin?” I wish we could begin, like, three decades ago, because bus stop shelters are more than just a nice-to-have—especially as our climate spins off further and further into extremes. Twice in the last two weeks my bus just never showed up, leaving me to sit and sweat in the sweltering sun. On a day like today, with Feels Like Temperatures forecasted around 105 °F, the combination of unreliable bus service and no protection from the elements can turn dangerous.
 

This morning’s longread

A Man With a Plan

Definitely read this piece in Richmond Magazine about the man who brought Urban Renewal—and the destruction of Black-owned neighborhoods—to Richmond. I loved Mary Wingfield Scott’s sick burn, calling him and his bros the “bulldozing brotherhood.”
 

When confronting poverty and urban blight, he and his peers favored removing dilapidated housing viewed as an impediment to progress. This led to the wholesale destruction of blocks of historic property. In Richmond, that often meant majority African-American neighborhoods. Ardent preservationist Mary Wingfield Scott derided Bartholomew and his ilk as the “bulldozing brotherhood.” As John Moeser, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor emeritus of urban studies and planning, and Bonner Center fellow at the University of Richmond, told Richmond magazine in an interview a few years ago, “The Bartholomew plan was in some respects very progressive, in other respects contradictory and racist.”
 

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Picture of the Day

Where’s your brood, guy?