🚂 Good morning, RVA: Marcus Alert launch, pedestrian deaths, and winter garden

Good morning, RVA! It’s 34 °F, but despite the chilly start, highs today—the first day of December—will hit 60 °F. You can expect even warmer weather tomorrow and Friday, so start planning ways to get outside and enjoy it before the sun sets at 4:30 PM or whatever.
 

Water cooler

Michael Martz and Mel Leonor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch report that Richmond’s Marcus Alert program starts today. Richmond is one of five localities to pilot a Marcus Alert, while the rest of the commonwealth has until July 1st, 2026 to get their programs off the ground. News to me: “The system also will rely initially on existing emergency hotlines, including diverted 911 calls, until a new 988 call line is created next July for a wide range of behavioral health emergencies, including suicide prevention.” Having a separate, non-911 number for the general public to call seems like a huge, practical step in the right direction. However, the state legislation creating and requiring localities to set up a Marcus Alert is not without its shortcomings, and you should tap through to read Princess Blanding’s thoughts. However, Senator McClellan, ever the statesperson, has this to say, “I carried the legislation that would have implemented the system the way she envisioned it and I would have preferred that, but I think any progress is a good first step.” I also enjoyed this quote from Delegate Bourne, “We’ve got to see how this works in practice, and whether we struck the right balance. What we have is hours of talks and compromise.” That’s the reality of how the legislative process works, and I’m glad we we able to take any first step—especially since the next several years do not look especially bright for any progressive legislation like this.
 

If you can stomach it, the RTD’s Mark Bowes reports on the five pedestrians hit and killed by drivers in Chesterfield County this year. Police, of course, are quick to blame pedestrians for wearing dark clothing or crossing the street while drunk—even though “drivers were charged in two of this year’s crashes; one of them was allegedly driving while intoxicated.” Also of note, four of the five vehicles in these incidents were trucks, SUVs, or big crossovers: a Kia Sorento, Toyota Tundra, Ford Explorer, and a Chevy Tahoe. Unfortunately, our transportation system is currently designed so that there are almost always literal life-or-death consequences for making a mistake while trying to get around our region. This is so broken. If we wanted to, we could design our infrastructure, streets, and vehicles so that people who need to get around at night, or had too much to drink, or are using a wheelchair, don’t end up dead when things don’t go as planned. For whatever horrible reason we’ve accepted these deaths as inevitable. Instead of working to fix the issue—limiting vehicle speed and building safe, separated spaces for people not enclosed in tons of hurtling metal—we tell people to wear a reflective vest and move on.
 

Yesterday, Matthew Yglesias—co-founder of Vox, now newsletter guy—tweeted, “My candidate for metro area that’s poised to boom is Richmond, VA growing into an extension of the northeastern megalopolis.” Kind of a duh for anyone living here over the past couple of years, right? But this kind of casual, national attention should really underscore for our leaders and elected officials the need to build a zillion more homes. People are coming! We can either let NIMBY neighborhood associations fight to the death over every single three-story apartment building or we can tell those folks to step aside and make space for our existing residents and the inevitable flood of newcomers.
 

I don’t know why, but I find this winter gardening piece at VPM by Maymont’s Peggy Singlemann to be incredibly relaxing. Three total cabbages make up the extent of my winter garden and I certainly do not have an orchard to tend to, but reading about mulching with hay, bringing herbs inside, and packing tools up for the winter just makes me feel so cozy?
 

Literally the opposite of cozy, /r/rva this morning is full of posts about a 4:00 AM train blowing its horn non-stop for about 15 minutes. I have no idea what it means, if anything, but the comments remind me that I love living in a city.
 

This morning’s longread

The Quest to Shoot an Arrow Farther Than Anyone Has Before

I just really love it when people get way, way into stuff—model trains, shooting arrows in the desert, whatever!
 

In an ancient white salt flat, 30 miles south of Nevada’s Route 50—“The Loneliest Road in America”—a man is looking up into a blue sky. His head is wrapped in a makeshift keffiyeh scarf to protect him from the sun. In a few moments he will lie down on his back. Between his upraised legs he will cradle a contraption akin to a medieval crossbow, and point it at an angle of roughly 40 degrees in the direction of a hazy mountaintop some four miles away. He is preparing to shoot arrows out into the thin desert air, one of which he hopes will break archery’s worldwide distance record of 2,028 yards, or 268 yards beyond the one-mile mark.
 

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Picture of the Day

I see you.