🦌 Good morning, RVA: Omicron invasion, microtransit, and the great albums of 2021

Good morning, RVA! It’s 44 °F, and we’ve got another unexpectedly warm day ahead of us. Today and tomorrow enjoy highs in the mid 60s and a bit of clouds. Then, on Sunday, expect a little cooler temperatures, but nothing winterlike. Have a great weekend, and I hope you get to spend some time outside recharging your batteries.
 

Water cooler

You can read President Biden’s plan to prepare for the Omicron invasion over on the White House website. Other than the regular stuff like encouraging booster shots and standing up even more vaccination clinics, the President announced that private insurance will now cover the cost of at-home COVID-19 tests. For uninsured folks, it sounds like the federal government will “double the commitment from September to distribute 25 million free tests to community sites to 50 million tests.” Related, and super cool, the Richmond Public Library will participate in a program to distribute free COVID-19 tests kits to folks, too. If you have symptoms or have been exposed to COVID-19 please go get tested! The rest of us can’t get sick! We’re too busy / have important plans to lay quietly on the couch watching horror films!
 

In surveys-to-fill-out news, GRTC has launched a “Richmond Region Micro-Transit Study” which includes this (unfortunately) MetroQuest survey. Why is GRTC asking me about microtransit, I can hear you say (and had a friend literally say to me)? Remember that the new regional transportation authority, the CVTA, is truly regional—including far flung counties like “New Kent” and “Goochland.” Those are places where, at least in America, fixed-route transportation (like the frequent bus lines in the city and Henrico County) has a hard time functioning. I can easily imagine that those localities on our region’s edge would still like to take advantage of all of this new transportation-related money and use it to provide some kind of rural-friendly public transit service—aka an on-demand, microtransit sort of deal. Folks out that way still need ways to get around if they can’t or don’t want to drive! A red flag for me, though: The CVTA earmarks 15% of its funds for GRTC, and I’m concerned that the money to pay for whatever eventual microtransit service would come out of GRTC’s already tiny bucket of cash. That 15% needs to be protected to pay for high-quality, frequent service on the region’s major corridors. If the region thinks a regional microtransit program important, the region can pay for it with the stack of cash specifically dedicated to regional projects.
 

I don’t know what to make of this, but Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on a new, anonymous casino survey floating around the city. Do the Urban One folks want to retry the casino referendum and are market-testing different messaging? Does someone else want to get into the casino game and think they have better odds at passing a referendum? Fascinating! At the moment, this story is mostly a nothing burger, but let’s pin it for later.
 

NPR dropped its top 50 albums of 2021, and Lucy Dacus’s Home Video takes the #3 spot! You might remember this album because one of the videos (and album cover!) is shot in the Byrd Theatre, and that’s pretty neat.
 

Alert! Richmond’s Christmas Parade makes its way down Broad Street—from the Capitol to Arthur Ashe Boulevard—starting at 10:00 AM tomorrow. This means plenty of street closures on and around the corridor beginning at 5:00 AM. Take a look at the aforelinked closure map and this list bus system detours (especially for the Pulse) if you plan on moving around the City tomorrow.
 

This morning’s longread

How the World’s Foremost Maze-Maker Leads People Astray

Maze people exist! That’s amazing!
 

Elsewhere in the maze, there were long stretches without any junctions. Oskar van Deventer, a Dutch telecom engineer and a renowned designer of mechanical puzzles, told me, “This is something you will recognize in all Adrian Fisher mazes: that it has some long corridors with no decision to be made.” This provides the choice-fatigued aspirant with a brief, blissful break, but, of course, as I discovered when I hit one and thought I must finally be on the right track, it also serves Fisher’s wily purposes. “A long journey with no choices reinforces the feeling that either you’re going to solve it—or you’re getting very lost,” Fisher explained.
 

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Picture of the Day