🍝 Good morning, RVA: Staples Mill Small Area Plan, suburban highways, and A+ teachers

Good morning, RVA! It’s 57 °F, and today—plus for the next handful of days—you can expect slightly cooler temperatures right around 70 °F. Sounds great to both me and my bicycle, to be quite honest. I’ve still got my eye on the five-day forecast which, unfortunately, has increased its prediction of rain to: Here and there for the whole time. So maybe expect a damp (but restful) long weekend.
 

Water cooler

The final version of the Staples Mill Small Area Plan dropped this week from VDOT, and, for a suburban highway that literally just this week I could not figure out how to safely cross on bike, it looks…pretty good! The recommendations include intersection improvements, continuous sidewalks and bike lanes, and conducting a study for possibly installing dedicated transit lanes, too. I’m impressed that so much progressive, urbanist stuff made it into a plan for what’s basically a long, linear strip mall (one that buzzes with potential, though!). Of course a small area plan is just that, a plan, and it will now be up to Richmond, Henrico, and probably the train people, to spend the money to get any or all of this implemented. Fingers crossed, because how nice would it be to safely and conveniently take the bus or ride a bike to a modern, high-speed train station on Staples Mill Road? Maybe in my lifetime even!
 

Speaking of suburban highways, Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports on the interchange expansions and modifications coming to Short Pump. It’s wild that folks think adding more interchange will solve the area’s traffic issues when we know, for a fact, demonstrated time and time again, that building more roads just leads to more traffic. The cost of these “improvements”, which will, in just a couple of years, result in the same backed-up, horrible traffic that we’ve got now? $250 million! One quarter of a billion dollars for, at best, a short term fix! Bananas! Also, side note, these enormous diverging diamond interchanges seem like the highway engineering version of supertall buildings—like, sure, they can exist but do they need to?
 

The Richmond Public School emails have made me feel a lot of unexpected emotions lately, so I’m going to keep sharing them with you. In this past Monday’s email, Superintendent Kamras celebrated some of the amazing and impressive RPS students, and now, in yesterday’s email, he’s got the highlights from the 2nd Annual RPS Shines event which celebrates teachers, support staff, and administrators. So many people put so much into our public school system, and it’s awesome to see so many of them recognized. Honestly, it must feel good to put this kind of celebratory email together and kind of makes me want to start some sort of Official GMRVA Awards for Public Service and Contributions To Zoning.
 

This is the last Thursday in May and the final Thursday in RVA Bike Month! Tonight, you’ve got two official options to participate in bike month: 1) The 6th Annual Bike Treasure Hunt Ride, which, according to the event description, you will need to “assemble your treasure hunting crew, be the fastest team to solve the clues, and win a cake!” If that sounds charming to you, meet at Fountain Lake at 6:30 PM; and 2) Ride your bike over to The Valentine at 6:00 PM for a free tour of the museum, plus a reception for the opening of their new exhibit Sign Spotting. My unofficial third option is for you to get on whatever bike you have and ride slowly around your neighborhood looking for interesting twists, turns, alleys, and paths, with the goal of finding something new-to-you. Every neighborhood, even the most suburban keychain of cul-de-sacs, has at least one unexplored surprise (“a keychain” is the collective noun for cul-de-sac, btw).
 

This morning’s longread

Objection to sexual, LGBTQ content propels spike in book challenges

The Washington Post looked over one thousand recent book bans and found that the majority started with complaints from just 11 humans. Fewer than a dozen people are responsible for the majority of our society’s current book-banning moral panic! Ridiculous!
 

The majority of the 1,000-plus book challenges analyzed by The Post were filed by just 11 people. Each of these people brought 10 or more challenges against books in their school district; one man filed 92 challenges. Together, these serial filers constituted 6 percent of all book challengers – but were responsible for 60 percent of all filings. One of them, Michelle Teague in North Carolina’s Catawba County schools, submitted 24 challenges against books in her district’s library last year, targeting titles from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” to Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” to Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”
 

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Picture of the Day

Pedal further!