Good morning, RVA! It's 39 °F, and temperatures bottom out today and tomorrow (as much as they can âbottom outâ in the middle of spring, I guess). You should expect highs in the 50s, some sunshine to warm things up a bit, and a forced return to your sock drawer. Sunday, things start to warm up again, and then, by this coming Tuesday, weâre back to the springtime 70s. Weâve got plenty to enjoy before then though, so throw on an additional layer and spend a bit of time outside with these sunny skies!
Yesterday, GRTC announced theyâve won a big $750,000 grant from the Federal Transit Administration to help kick off some very important land use planning. Specifically, the money will âplan for Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) on Chamberlayne Avenue in advance of GRTCâs future North/South Pulse Bus Rapid Transit Line.â I imagine the final product will look something like 2017âs Pulse Corridor Plan, which helped the City figure our the proper land use and zoning around Broad Street ahead of actually building the Pulse. Spend six seconds driving down Chamberlayne Avenue and youâll see a corridor with industrial sections that need drastic upzoning and sleepy sections of old single-family-home street-car suburbs. Itâs a complex corridor and will need a thoughtful planning process to figure out the best way to build great transit thatâs supported by great neighborhoods.
Also, did you catch that GRTC called this north-south BRT the âPulseâ too? I think thatâs the first time Iâve seen âPulseâ used when referring to this new potential line. That makes the most sense to me; we donât need to have cute names for each and every bus rapid transit line we build. We will, however, need some sort of way to differentiate these lines eventuallyâby color or number or something. Cardinal direction wonât work when we have a bunch of these things running diagonally across the region.
Also also, itâll be interesting to see how this planning process takes advantage of (or runs up against) the upcoming zoning ordinance rewrite.
Virginia Tech is out here throwing cold water on my plans to spend the back half of April taking hundreds of photos of cicadas from Brood XIX as they crawl out from wherever it is theyâve been for the last 13 years. Apparently we may be a little too far north which âmakes it difficult to predict where Brood XIX cicadas will emerge.â Tap through to see a comparison photo between regular, annual cicadas (still cool) and the periodic variety (way more mysterious). The former are black and green, while the latter are more reddish in color.
John Murden at South Richmond News has a picture of Richmondâs oldest frame house. Built in the late 1750s it sits at what is now 5613 Kildare Drive. First, thatâs way further west than I would have expected for this sort of Richmond history! Second, itâs kind of wild that houses from 300 years ago just look like houses from today. I guess weâve kind of settled on what a âhouseâ looks like?
Friends of the Richmond Public Library will host their annual spring book sale today through Sunday down at the Main Library (101 E. Franklin Street). Stop by this weekend and find something new to throw on top of that ever-growing stack of books on your nightstand. Proceeds benefit Richmond Public Library programming, which is broad and vast and important to our communities!
If youâre looking for recommendations, two books I just finished:
Interior Chinatown which I absolutely loved. Itâs weird, interesting, funny, and thoughtful.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is set in the far future (or deep past?), and while itâs definitely a science fiction novella, itâs one of the most romantic things Iâve read in the past (or future!) forever.
Reading through my COVID-19 update from April 5th, 2022, I was reminded that today, in 2024, you can still monitor the COVID-19 levels in wastewater across the country via this nice page on the CDCâs website. In fact, nationally, the wastewater viral activity level for COVID-19 is low for the first time since last summer. Now, this doesnât necessarily mean that thereâs no COVID-19 swirling around in your specific community, but it does mean that itâs probably saferâat least as far as coronaviruses goâto travel across the country for an eclipse than it has been in a while. Honestly, the biggest risk to your safety if youâre eclipsebound is probably the long drive across Americaâs highway system.
Earlier this week, Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond wrote a throw-away line about Virginiaâs different regions, listing them out as: âRichmond, NoVa, Hampton Roads, Charlottesville, Roanoke and whatever the hell is west of Roanoke.â In response, Cardinal News, an independent news site the that covers Southwest and Southside Virginia, wrote this really nice piece explaining exactly whatever the hell is west of Roanoke and why itâs a lovely and important part of the Commonwealth.
I understand why itâs easy to dismiss the western part of the state. Weâre a long way away from Richmond â and lots of other places. Roanoke is closer to two other state capitals than it is to our own, and the numbers go up from there. By the time you get out to Ewing in western Lee County, youâre closer to nine other state capitals than our own. Distance creates different perspectives: A study a few years ago by two geographers found that, based on commuting patterns, the western part of the state was economically disconnected from the rest of Virginia â we tend to look south to North Carolina or west to Tennessee. Itâs not just our rivers that run west and south; so do our people. The whole controversy over whether the Wizards and Capitals would move to Virginia meant very little out here. Those arenât the teams we root for.
If youâd like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the olâ Patreon.
What an excellent logo and paint job on this bike!