🚲 Good morning, RVA: Osborne Turnpike, part-time legislators, and weighing in on bike lanes

Good morning, RVA! It’s 47 °F, and today looks sunny and wonderful with highs in the 70s. NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says it’s his Verified Best Weather Day of the Week™ and that it caps off the “third warmest Meteorological Winter in Richmond’s history.” If I weren’t headed to VCU’s final home game of the season, I’d spend the evening out getting lost in the woods. I hope you find the time today to get out there and enjoy it!
 

Water cooler

This past Sunday, Henrico County Supervisor Tyrone Nelson hit a person riding their bike with his car. From NBC12’s report: “The Henrico Police Department says Tyrone Nelson failed to give a three-foot distance when trying to pass the cyclist in the 6500 block of Osborne Turnpike around 11:45 a.m.” This block of Osborne Turnpike is just 1.5 miles from where a driver hit and killed Jonah Holland while she was riding her bike this past August. There’s no doubt that this stretch of road is dangerous, but how many people need to get hurt or killed before the County does anything about it? If an elected official, someone who has the actual power to make this street safer, can hit someone with their car and just move on with life…I don’t know. Depressing.
 

Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has some electoral next steps now that we’ve got this past weekend’s firehouse primaries behind us. First up, the special election on March 28th, and then the Democratic primary on June 20th (which gears up for the big November election). Also this is the first reporting I’ve read that confirms soon-to-be Senator Bagby (from the now-old 9th Senate District) will run in the new 14th Senate District in that June 20th primary.
 

Speaking of the General Assembly, Bob Lewis at the Virginia Mercury pulls the numbers on the part-timedness of our commonwealth’s legislative body. Given the ridiculously short amount of time our legislators spend actually legislating (just 46 days this year), to get through all of the bills submitted they’d need to “average final action on 45 bills per day.” Impossible! What’s also impossible is changing the system to something that makes a little more sense. I think a lot folks like how the General Assembly works because it’s weird, brutal, and inaccessible—sort of like an unnecessarily painful badge of civic honor.
 

Today is the very last day that you can weigh in on the City’s plan to bring bike lanes to Westover Hills Boulevard from the Nickel Bridge to points south. I encourage you to fill out the quick survey if you haven’t already, asking for physical protection along the lanes and (kindly) reminding the City’s Department of Public Works that sharrows are not real infrastructure. Additionally, the folks at Bike Walk RVA point out that extending the bike lane down 49th Street to a residential dead end doesn’t connect anything to anywhere at the moment, and the proposal should, instead, continue the lanes down Westover Hills Boulevard south to Crutchfield. If, like me, you have to see it on a map, I crayoned Bike Walk RVA’s preferred alignment here. So, to recap: 1) Add protection the the bike lanes, 2) Don’t use sharrows, and 3) Extend the bike lanes on Westover Hills Boulevard to Crutchfield. Take four minutes and fill out the survey this morning (it’s your last day to do so!).
 

This morning’s longread

Let Lily Kwong—and a Mountainful of Orchids—Resensitize Your Cold, Dead Heart

First, orchids! Second, I thought this was an incredibly thoughtful answer to the nihilistic question (which I see pop up in internet discourse constantly) of “why do anything at all, isn’t everything terrible?”
 

Before I go, I’m curious how Kwong, whose work in horticulture and urban design has also sought to address issues of native gardening and food insecurity, sees how these flashy, large-scale stunners, often brought to life at the behest of corporate brand partnerships, exist in conversation with her overall mission to connect people with the natural world. In response, Kwong eagerly asks me if I’ve ever been to Muir Woods. “They’re the tallest trees in the world—literally these ancient giants that are hundreds of years old,” she says, thinking back to her childhood again. “It’s a spiritual experience walking through them,” Kwong explains. “It feels almost like a cathedral…that is my framework of how I first connected with nature. So, when I do a piece like this, or Grand Central, I’m trying to channel that frequency of awe. Because in my experience, from awe came the curiosity. Then came education, knowledge, understanding, and stewardship.”
 

If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
 

Picture of the Day

Getting lost in the forest.