🏢 Good morning, RVA: Surface-level parking?, infrastructure design, and annexation

Good morning, RVA! It’s 37 °F, and it is cold in my house! Today you can expect highs in the 50s and sunshine, but you’ll find me wrapped inside a sweatshirt. Temperatures should warm up, bit by bit, and find their way to a really lovely place by this weekend. For now, though, stay cozy out there!
 

Water cooler

I swear this diagram was not in here when I read the story yesterday, but, as of right now, Richmond BizSense has a drawing of what Dominion’s Downtown electric car charging thing would look like. And it…looks like a surface-level parking lot? With some grass? Does Dominion really intend on replacing an entire office tower with a surface level parking lot right in the middle of Downtown? This seems bad for a host of reasons, but it’s especially counter to Richmond 300’s vision for the area: “New infill development matches the intensity of existing buildings and includes active ground floor uses that enliven the sidewalks.” Eco-parking (or whatever they’re calling it) is not that!
 

A couple days ago, RVAHub ran this story from the Capital News Service about traffic violence in the region. Reporter Darlene Johnson talked to Natalie Rainer who was out biking with Jonah Holland the day she was hit and killed by a driver. Incredibly, Rainer says she will ride a bike again, which is inspiring and heartbreaking in a bunch of ways for me. Johnson also talked to Doug Allen, board member of the Virginia Bicycling Federation, who has some good words about how to prevent horrible crashes like Jonah and Natalie’s in the future: “‘People will drive as fast as they feel comfortable driving,’ Allen said…[he] believes infrastructure design should be the primary focus of making streets safer.”
 

Super related, celebrity Traffic Engineer Dongho Chang posted a really interesting photo of a road in Washington State with the centerline removed and space added on either side for walking and biking. The idea here is to narrow the width of the vehicular travel space and take away some of visual cues drivers rely on and force them to pay attention to their surroundings, which should slow them down. Notice it didn’t require pouring concrete for new sidewalks or installing flex posts for a protected bike lane, just grinding off some old paint and putting down new lines. We’re definitely several years out from attempting anything like this in Richmond, but it’s an interesting solution we should consider—especially in the portions of the City’s Southside that were annexed from Chesterfield and lack urban infrastructures like sidewalks.
 

Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams writes a memorial to Dr. John Moeser, who died this past Monday. Moeser literally wrote the book on annexation, which you can download and read for free, and played a huge role in pushing Richmond forward. UR Professor Julian Maxwell Hayter had this to say, “This city has only very recently come to terms with the historical legacy of Jim Crow and the extent in which it cast a shadow on contemporary Richmond. And he is the one that really broke open the legacy…I think without John Moeser, we would all be trying to explain modern Richmond through slavery.” Hayter called Moeser’s death a “loss of epic proportions.”
 

Tyler Lane at WTVR reports on this past Monday’s RPS School Board meeting and has some new reporting on the Board’s general messiness. There’s a lot in here, but there are three things I want to point out. First, this quote from the Board’s chair about their continued practice of introducing sea-change motions with zero notice and zero public engagement: “Motions are based on discussions that can happen at any time on the agenda. That is a fact. People do not like it, but as the chair, I will not deny that opportunity for school board members; any of them. Anyone can call for a motion at any time during a meeting if we like it or not. Show me the Code of Virginia that says we cannot.” Just because you can, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea! Second, “In a statement to the CBS 6 Problem Solvers, [Board Chair] Harris-Muhammed said it was not the role of the board to address administration vacancies but expressed ‘grave concerns’ over what she considered a ‘delay’ in filling critical roles.” That’s hilarious/brutal given how the School Board has pushed out members of the Superintendent’s administration, stripped funding for some positions, and spent a heck of a lot of time involving themselves in what should be the administration’s role. Third, I have to admit I can’t really follow the storyline about RPS’s “Corrective Action Plan” and who needs to report back what to the Virginia Department of Education. Whatever reality actually looks like, it’s never good to have VDOE folks in the media calling out the administration for not submitting reports. Like I said: General messiness!
 

Keyris Manzaneres at VPM reports on two hygiene pantries in Richmond put together by Feed the Streets RVA, which I think is a clever evolution of the Little Free Library / Community Fridge idea. It’s hard to feel human if you don’t have your basic needs met, and it’s incredibly challenging to operate in our society if you don’t fit whatever definition of “clean” it is that we have for folks.
 

This morning’s longread

The value of ‘crip time’- Discarding notions of productivity and guilt, to listen to the rhythms of our bodies

I’m still working my way through some of the links from Anne Helen Petersen’s recent column about calendars and thinking through how different people experience time differently. Below are some good lessons about how folk who are disabled or chronically ill prioritize time to take care of their bodies and minds.
 

When I still worked a full-time job in 2016, navigating the hours of travel, working hours and hours my body-mind needed as down time was worse than juggling. I began to feel exhausted from the conflicting emotions of productivity and guilt, for not being productive “enough”. Over time, I took the decision to not work full time anymore. To travel/commute less. To restrict how many trips I make every month. To navigate the number of rest days I had between each work task, say trainings or workshops or conferences. The mathematics around managing my time is still all-consuming, but I am slowly learning to listen to the rhythms of my body.
 

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Picture of the Day

Sometimes you install a bike rack in your side yard and get five kids locking their bikes up to it.