🥵 Good morning, RVA: Welcome back, a packed Planning Commission, and anti-climate infrastructure

Good morning, RVA! It’s 71 °F, and today looks hot and dry—well, super humid of course but no serious chance of rain. Expect temperature near 90 °F today and for the rest of the week.
 

Water cooler

Welcome back, to myself! I had a lovely and much-needed break from early-morning emails but am now ready to dive back in. I am, however, using my two-week vacation as a reason to stop updating my coronacounts spreadsheet each and every day. I started updating that thing way back on March 14th, 2020 and did so every single day for 475 days! It’ll live on as a historical record, and, if you’re still after current data, you can always find the most recent statewide numbers on the VDH dashboard. I imagine I’ll pull updates from said dashboard from time to time—and even reserve the right to revive the spreadsheet should the need present itself (fingers crossed it will not). Finally, of note to fellow datawatchers, the aforementioned VDH data dashboard has a new update scheduled and will no longer update on weekends.
 

The City’s Planning Commission has a packed agenda for their meeting today, which you can scroll through here. Most interesting to me are the plans for a proposed newly temporary GRTC transfer plaza. This new temporary transfer plaza would replace the current temporary transfer plaza that has taken up the eastern side of 9th street for a bunch of years at this point—a location that’s about to become a demolition site as the City tears down the old Public Safety building. The new plaza would replace most of the weirdly sunken surface parking lot across the street, which seems like a much better use of that space. As I’ve said many times before, I have a real hard time understanding engineering diagrams, but it looks like the new proposal includes shelter from the sun, benches, trash cans, and a bathroom for bus operators. It also includes a fence “at the request of DPW Parking Services to prevent bus patron access to the [remainder of the] parking lot,” which as this public comment points out, seems unnecessary. Also of interest on CPC’s agenda: Getting rid of a small Confederate monument pedestal in the triangle park at Meadow, Park, and Stuart; and permitting an accessory dwelling unit that’s a treehouse (love this quote from the staff report: “a Special Use Permit is necessary because the short-term rental regulations do not pertain to accessory structures such as the tree house”).
 

I’m excited when citizen scientists do pretty much anything, but especially when they help with Richmond’s heat mapping efforts. Patrick Larsen at VPM reports on an update to the 2017 temperature study data that you’re probably very familiar with at this point as it basically kicked off a national focus on the correlation between the urban heat island effect and redlining. This new work will update that data, plus a bunch of other cities in the Commonwealth will collect their first, baseline data. Putting it out into the world: I would like to ride my bicycle around and collect temperature and particulate matter data as a citizen scientist.
 

It’s hard not to feel a sense of overwhelmed hopelessness when reading this article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch by Colbi Edmonds: “More than 80% of a 20-year Richmond region transportation plan is dedicated for highway projects. Some want that changed.” I don’t fault the regional planners too much for this particular plan’s intense focus on highways and road widenings—there’s only so much they can do to steer a massive group made up of nine localities, most of them suburban and rural. It is wild to me, though, that leadership in our region can look around at the world today and pour billions into infrastructure that will bake climate-destroying development patterns into our communities for the next several generations. As I am frequently reminded, most of our region is only accessible by car. This is by design. We could, instead, use this pile of money to try and retrofit those existing car-dependent communities as best we could rather than building more of them.
 

Richmond Public Schools will put together welcome baskets for teachers when they return to in-person instruction this fall and needs your help. If you’d like to chip in, you can donate supplies for the baskets by filling out this form, or you can volunteer to help assemble or deliver the baskets by filling out this other form.
 

This morning’s longread

Who’s Afraid of the Four Day Work Week?

Here I am linking to an article about the four-day work week after taking a bunch of time off. Read this, though, and tell me it doesn’t sound like an experiment worth trying.
 

Harmony doesn’t mean balance. It suggests each part of one’s life supporting and complementing the other: you’re a better person at work because of the person you’re able to be when you’re not working, and vice-versa. And that harmony is possible because you’re able to nourish the area of life that so many of us have allowed, or been forced, to let wither. Harmony is a beautiful thing. Once found, you can’t forget it. Other sounds and experiences feel meager and reedy in comparison. But it takes real work to achieve.
 

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

Picture of the Day

Now you have to deal with pictures from my vacation for the next several days.