🤖📸 Good morning, RVA: The best time to get vaccinated, more sidewalks, and AI-generated pictures of Richmond

Good morning, RVA! It’s 70 °F, and is it hot again? I think it might be hot again. Today you can expect highs near 90 °F with temperatures increasing throughout the week. You know the deal: Stay cool, stay hydrated.
 

Water cooler

I think this map from the CDC’s Data Tracker page tells you everything you need to know about the amount of COVID-19 out in our communities. Like almost the rest of the entire country, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield are all experiencing high levels of community transmission. Yesterday, Virginia posted over 1,800 new cases! I think getting a COVID-19 vaccine is a lot like planting a tree. The best time to do it was four months ago, the second best time to do it is today.
 

I had set a reminder to tell you about GRTC’s new passenger policies which took effect yesterday, but, unfortunately related to the previous paragraph, the only thing that’s changed is that GRTC will allow a bit more room towards the front for folks to stand. Masks are still (federally) mandated, rear-door boarding is required (although front-door boarding is available for folks who need assistance), and fares remain free. Give this summer’s trajectory, I think you can expect the currently policies to remain in place for a while.
 

Take a couple of minutes and read Ben Campbell’s column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the history of slavery in Shockoe Bottom and the importance of building the new museum down there. This part got me: “But the most dramatic moment was the discovery in 2005 and the excavation in 2008 of the Lumpkin’s Slave Jail in Shockoe Valley. The foundations and courtyard of the jail were intact. It was deep in the swamp of Shockoe Bottom, hidden away in the floodplain, miserable and ugly —from 10 to 50 feet beneath the interstate highway and parking lot — the 20th century’s way of keeping the secret.” There are lots of sentences I wanted to quote at you, so, really, set aside the time to read the full thing this morning.
 

The RTD’s Chris Suarez has the details on the City’s plan to invest $2.4 million in sidewalks over the next 12 months. That’s about five times the annual investment we’ve seen in sidewalks recently. Certainly a huge improvement, but this bit is wild: “Stoney and Vincent said the current [sidewalk maintenance] backlog equates to about six years of work, but they are hopeful that the $2.4 million allocated this year can begin to reduce the workload to one year by the end of 2023.” This is what I’m talking about when I say we have decades of disinvestment in our city’s infrastructure! These repairs are only possible because of funds coming from the new Central Virginia Transportation Authority, and it’s great seeing Richmond use their share of that money for something other than widening road (like some other localities). It makes you think about what kind of generational investments could be made in our infrastructure with that $150 million of ARPA money, right?
 

RTD hat-trick! Ali Rockett reports on the details of a new plan out of the Richmond Police Department to “install cameras that capture every license plate that passes in neighborhoods where mostly Black and brown populations live or frequent.” I have a lot of questions! Data access, usage, storage, and retention are really, really important details when implementing programs like this, and I’d love to know more. Sounds like RRHA boardmember Barrett Hardiman is on a similar page, saying, “I would like updates on where, when and how the readers will be used at RRHA neighborhoods and updates on the usage of the data collected.”
 

This morning’s longread

The Seas Are Rising. Could Oysters Protect Us?

We’ve been reintroducing oysters to the Bay with delicious results for years, but I love these next-level ideas about building man-made reefs and breakwaters.
 

The project, which will cost sixty million dollars in federal funding—a modest sum for a flood-protection system that protects a long urban shoreline—includes nine separate breakwater segments, spanning twenty-four hundred linear feet across the bay; a floating oyster nursery; an environmental-education hub; and a set of man-made tide pools, shallow rocky basins built in the zones where water and land mingle at high tide. “A lot of coastal infrastructure lacks surface complexity,” Pippa Brashear, one of Orff’s colleagues at SCAPE, told me. “It’s mostly hard walls.” The SCAPE project will be the opposite.
 

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

Picture of the Day

Inspired by my favorite AI blog, this past weekend I spent some time using an AI (VQGAN+CLIP) to generate “pictures” of Richmond. For this entire week, you get to enjoy beautiful/horrifying pictures of some of Richmond’s most memorable landmarks—as envisioned by AI.
 

To start, here’s the iconic Main Street Station. Simply stunning.