💌 Good morning, RVA: Email your legislators, a Council work session, and the State of the James

Good morning, RVA! It’s 53 °F, and we have one, final warm day before rain moves in tonight, bringing with it much colder temperatures. Today you can expect highs in the mid 70s and maybe some clouds, tomorrow you can look forward to highs around 50 °F. The sun sets right before 5:00 PM today, so if you want to enjoy this weather, get out there early!
 

Water cooler

“State proposes ban on riding bikes past Capitol,” reports Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury. This headline does such an excellent job at highlighting the absolute absurdity of the Department of General Service’s plan to permanently sever Richmond’s bike network by making Bank Street—the primary east-west connector for people on bikes—forever impassable. The Director of DGS, Joe Damico, who plans to disrupt all east-west bike traffic for the rest of time, “defended the proposed dismount area as a sensible safety measure, noting that he had occasionally seen near collisions between bicycles and pedestrians in the area.” To rephrase what’s happening here: The State wants to permanently ban riding bikes on a long-standing piece of Richmond’s bike network because one man never once saw an actual problem. If this shortsighted, unsafe plan makes you furious, please email your state legislators today, and tell them you would like the Department of General Services to include on Bank Street “a 10-foot-wide path with no requirement to dismount—an approach…in keeping with accepted design standards for bike lanes.” Don’t feel like you have to write a Federalist Paper about it either—you can literally just copy/paste the previous sentence. The important thing here is just to raise the issue to your elected representatives. You can find your legislators and their email addresses using this tool. It’s time for civics!
 

Today, Richmond’s City Council will hold a work session to hammer out the details of the legislative requests they’ll make at this year’s General Assembly plus potential changes they’d like made to the City’s charter. Both of those documents, and this one of legislation that are not recommended to include in the request, are really interesting windows into Council’s priorities (if a little over my head). Flip through the PDFs and you will see a bunch of topics that come up in this email regularly, like an ask for millions of dollars to rebuild our sewer system and school buildings, tweaking Council’s influence over future master plans, and giving localities the authority to do inclusive zoning. Don’t hold your breath on the new Republican-heavy General Assembly moving on any of these things, but it is nice to have them written down in a public document I suppose.
 

Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that “Homeward, the Richmond region’s coordinating agency for homeless services, received a $2.5 million grant from the Bezos Day One Fund, a philanthropic entity that supports organizations working to end child and family homelessness.” That’s a lot of money, and Homeward plans on using it to create “dedicated outreach positions focused on households with children experiencing homelessness.” I didn’t know this, but Robinson also says the Bezos Day One Fund has invested over $6 million in the Richmond region over the last couple of years.
 

The James River Association has released their 2021 State of the James report, scoring our most beautiful and best thing at a 64%, which figures out to a B- on their grading scale. This is down a point from 2019, but fairly consistent with the scores over the last decade or so. Positives: The James River is just lousy with bald eagles; Negatives: American shad are on the “brink of collapse.” You should tap through and read the whole report, though, because it does an excellent job illustrating how specific legislation can impact actual things like the amount of nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment in the river.
 

Speaking of the river, via /r/rva a long-exposure photo of…rings of fire?…down on the Pipeline. I’m not quite sure what’s happening here but it looks sweet, and I’m going to try not to think to hard about what all of those sparks flying into the river mean for any nearby American shad.
 

This morning’s longread

How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives

I agree with the thesis of this essay: Weeks are dumb. If I could change anything about our weak week structure, it’d be adding an additional day to the weekend. Bring on the four-day work week (or, more interesting, the eight-day week)!
 

There’s got to be a reason for seven, but people like to argue about what it could possibly be. On the one hand, it seems as though it must be an attempt to reconcile the cycles of the sun and the moon; each of the four phases of the moon (full, waxing, half, and waning) lasts about seven days, though not exactly seven days. On the other hand, the number seven comes up in Genesis: God rested on the seventh day. Another reason for seven lies in the heavens. Many civilizations seem to have counted and named days of the week for the sun and the moon and the five planets that they knew about, a practice that eventually migrated to Rome.
 

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Picture of the Day