🚈 Good morning, RVA: Housing, trains, and coffee cake beer

Good morning, RVA! It’s 25 °F, but temperatures should work their way back into the mid 40s by this afternoon. The weekend ahead of us looks cloudy but not super cold—in fact we might not see super cold until next year.

Water cooler

Before any sports season starts, every team is undefeated and aspirational national champions. That’s kind of where we are right now with the General Assembly. Legislators have started to introduce their bills, and, right now, each one has an opportunity to pass through the how-a-bill-becomes-a-law process. A couple years back, this period of time was terrifying and often embarrassing as national media would focus on whatever terrible bill Republican Bob Marshall submitted. Now though, we’ve got incredibly exciting and progressive bills to celebrate like Delegate Samirah’s Housing Agenda, headlined by HB152 which would require localities to legalize duplexes on all single-unit zoned lots across the entire state. If we want to create more affordable housing, reduce reliance on cars, and work towards our climate goals we need denser housing—that’s just a physical fact of geometry. This bill does not mandate we tear down all of the incredibly expensive mansions in Windsor Farms, but it would allow someone to build two incredibly expensive mansions on a single Windsor Farms lot should they wish to do so. A bill like HB152 would bypass all the yelling and screaming at local City Councils and Boards of Supervisors and save local advocates—across issues like bike, ped, transit, housing, climate, and smart growth—a lot of work. Will it pass? Will it even make it out of committee? I don’t know, but I’m stoked to see it exist.

Whoa, trains! Yesterday, the Governor announced that Virginia will buy 225 miles of track from CSX and invest in a bunch of new passenger rail improvements. Max Smith with WTPO has the super fascinating details on the $3.7 billion deal. This is enormous news for the entire region, but, for Richmond, this means new trains north to DC and points beyond starting as soon as next year. By 2030, we should have hourly service to DC from Main Street Station all day long. Dang, y’all! That’s a huge improvement from today’s two trains. Just two! There’s more, too: Virginia will replace the Long Bridge, which chokes up every train heading through D.C. But maybe the best part of this whole train deal is that the State realized that, to reduce traffic on I-95, adding more lanes to the highway wouldn’t do anything to help the problem and would cost way, way more. I know ten years out seems like forever away, but for a train project this is incredibly quick and exciting!

Bike Walk RVA reminds me that City Council adopted ORD. 2019–315 a couple weeks back, which officially adds “within a bicycle lane” to the list of places you can’t park your car. The same list includes “within 15 feet of a fire hydrant,” so, like, they really mean it, and it will cost you a $60 fine if you’re too rude and lazy to find somewhere else to put your car!

Last night, Camille Schrier, a VCU student working on her doctorate in pharmacy, became the next Miss America. Miss America is a whole thing, but this sentence is just the best: “Her talent—a dramatic science demonstration of the catalytic conversion of hydrogen peroxide that shot bursts of colored foam high into the air—launched her over many of the other finalists, who showed off more traditional skills such as dancing and ballad singing.” Hell yeah, science!

OK Hardywood, I’m intrigued by your 6% ABV Coffee Cake Stout that’s only available at…Wawa?? Y’all remember when you had to win a lottery to wait in line to spin a game show wheel to even have a chance to buy a bottle of Hardywood’s Gingerbread Stout? Now you can’t walk into a Christmas Party without tripping over a palette of the stuff.

Logistical note! I’m going to take the next couple of week off from Good Morning, RVA to rest, relax, read some PDFs, and probably eat a bunch of cinnamon rolls. I‘ll shoot for a return to your inboxes no later than 6th, but maybe before then if I feel particularly motivated. If anything bananas happens between then and now, you might could see a short note from me—like if that report from the Navy Hill Development Advisory Commission drops and is particularly juicy. Have an excellent end of 2019, and, if you want to stay in touch, you can always chip in a couple of bucks over on the ol’ patreon to get access to the GMRVA Slack. See you in 2020!

This morning’s longread

The Cannonball Run Record Is Everything That’s Wrong With Car Culture

This reminds me of articles where folks running illegal Airbnbs get interviewed and are like “Yeah! It’s great, this thing that we are totally doing and is totally against the law!”

Everything about the Cannonball Run, by contrast, is defiantly outlaw, down to its origins: it was started by Car & Driver magazine (another sister publication to Bicycling) in 1971, partly as a protest against speed limit laws. And it’s well past time to stop tolerating it, much less celebrating it. It’s clear that the drivers in the most recent attempt don’t fear punishment. They weren’t caught in the act, and while they’ve admitted flagrant speeding, and telematics from both the vehicle and the GPS systems they used would provide incontrovertible evidence, I don’t expect any enterprising prosecutor to subpoena that information. Everything about the Cannonball Run, from its entitled, narcissistic beginnings to how we talk about it, exemplifies the worst excesses of car culture in this country. Maybe once, in some America of long ago, it had a purpose, but that’s gone now. It’s time for the Cannonball Run to die, before someone does.

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This morning’s Instagram