🚫 Good morning, RVA: Maybe go car-lite?, AI regulations update, and good dive bars

Good morning, RVA! It’s 51 °F, and that was a lot of rain last night! Today, however, you can expect dry skies and temperatures to stay almost unchanged from where they are this morning. Hope you enjoy it, because this same set of weather will probably stick around for at least the next 10 days.
 

Water cooler

The Richmond Police Department are reporting a fatal hit and run this morning at the intersection of Hull Street Road and Orcutt Lane, and have asked if anyone in the community has more information. From the RPD release: “At approximately 1:30 a.m., officers were called to the intersection of Hull Street Road and Orcutt Lane for the report of a person down in the roadway. Officers arrived and found an adult male down and unresponsive in the westbound lane of Hull Street Road. He was pronounced dead at the scene…Detectives are asking for anyone who saw the collision or anyone who saw a vehicle with front-end damage early this morning in the area to call investigators.” If you have any information, you can call the RPD Crash Team at 804.646.1709 or Crime Stoppers at 804.780.1000.
 

I feel like the RTD is trying to radicalize me against cars in Carytown. Earlier this year, Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams wrote this column against the idea of a car-free Carytown (which made me sad), and now the full editorial board has weighed in with a very all-or-nothing argument, too. On the spectrum of banning cars, I’m definitely closer to the “throw them all in the trash forever” end of things, and I’ve definitely linked to this absolutely true, no-lies-detected “CARS RUIN CARYTOWN” shirt multiple times in the past. That said, there are a thousand and one ways to increase pedestrian safety in Carytown and reduce the priority given to drivers—removing cars from the street is just one of them. Framing the conversation as “either we ban cars in Carytown or we do nothing at all” drives me nuts and pushes me further towards wheat pasting CARS RUIN CARYTOWN signs on every flat surface I can find. It doesn’t need to be like this! In fact, here are two specific steps forward that I’d like to see the City take in Carytown: 1) Pick a single Sunday a month to close the street to cars, just to see how it goes; and 2) get rid of one lane and use it to expand the space for people (including restaurant seating). Neither of these would result in the instant immolation of one of our best, urban retail districts and both would let us ease into a future car-lite Carytown.
 

VPM’s Jahd Khalil asked the Governor’s administration about their forthcoming policy regulating how state government will use generative AI, which, remember, was due this past Friday. Andrew Wheeler, head of the commonwealth’s Office of Regulatory Management, said he delivered the new guidance to the governor on Thursday and that “The governor had some questions. And we will be fine tuning some of the documents before that before they’ll be released publicly.” I guess I’ll just keep shifting my reminder to look for these documents a couple weeks into the future until they eventually exist! I just wish I knew where exactly on the internet to look for them…
 

Remember how the General Assembly decided that Richmond needed to overhaul its sewer system by 2035 but failed to provide the financial resources necessary to do so? Then, do you further remember how in last year’s budget, the State earmarked $100 million to put a small dent in the overall cost of this enormous project, but, somehow, that money mysteriously vanished out of the very late, final version of the budget? Now, David Ress at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Governor Youngkin only plans to include $50 million towards the city’s sewer system in his upcoming budget, less than was promised last year and not nearly enough to make the progress required to meet the arbitrary-feeling 2035 deadline. Richmond needs more money, year over year, to fix this issue, not less! But, as with all things budget, you never know what you’ll end up with until the ink from the governor’s signature has dried on the piece of paper. With any luck, Democrats in the General Assembly will find a way to restore the missing $50 million during this year’s back-and-forth budget session (and maybe even add some more on top of that).
 

I look through the “Richmond’s Favorite Things” list in RVA Mag, just to make sure I’m spending enough time at the city’s best dive bars.
 

This morning’s longread

South Pole Signage

I loved this post about the actual signs hanging up in a research station at the South Pole. Some of them look like they belong in a suburban office park! Office work (and the people doing it) is sort of the same no matter where in the world it happens, I guess.
 

But also – We live here! And living in a place means that it will develop a certain rhythm. A certain set of norms, customs, fault lines, battle scars, inside jokes, remembrances. Day-to-day reminders of the folks who have left their mark on this place over the years. We still fight over slammed doors. We still do routine custodial tasks. We still have fire alarms, plumbing leaks, coffee spills, movie nights. Spreadsheets. Labeling schemes. Workflows and processes, official and unofficial. We have signs because Bad Things happened once, and now they’re immortalized forever with homegrown, earnest warnings. We have official OSHA signage; we have earnest hand-scrawled pleas. Signs that make you scratch your head. Signs that could exist in a suburban office park anywhere on earth. Signs that can only exist at the South Pole.
 

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Picture of the Day

Always look down the alley.