🧗 Good morning, RVA: What even are improvements, new bus routes, and Riverrock!

Good morning, RVA! It’s 55 °F, and this morning looks cloudy with the sky maybe clearing up and getting its act together late this afternoon. Other than that, you can expect highs in the 70s and a generally good vibe. Temperatures increase a bit tomorrow, but I think we’ve got a really great weekend ahead of us—plus, the early forecast for next week looks wonderful, too!
 

Water cooler

Earlier this week, the City’s Department of Public Works sent out a press release announcing pedestrian safety improvements to almost three dozen intersections across Richmond. Over the next year, crews will install high-visibility crosswalks, accessible ramps, and pedestrian countdown signals at locations currently without them. While this is good and important work, it does feel like, as a community, we’ve moved beyond celebrating the installation of these kind of basic, table-stakes improvements to our streets. I’m not even sure I should call them “improvements,” they’re just the standard, necessary things you include in an intersection and without them these intersections are unsafe and incomplete. Additionally and fascinatingly, @rvadotra on Twitter points out that some (most?) of the 35 intersections already have crosswalks, ramps, and pedestrian countdown signals. What does that mean? I dunno! Honestly, I’m not trying to be overly cynical about critical infrastructure like ADA curb ramps, but I am trying to be more realistic about how much actual action the City is taking to make our streets safer. Just look at the pictures in this article by Jake Burn at CBS6 and see the large corner radiuses (once you see, you can’t unsee!), long crossing distances, and overly-wide streets. We could install real, physical infrastructure—above and beyond curb ramps and countdown signals—to make these places actually safer for people…if we wanted to.
 

Ian M. Stewart at VPM has a nice recap of the Ride of Silence at which folks installed a Ghost Bike for Jonah Holland. Make sure you flip through the pictures at the bottom of the article, too.
 

Quick City Council note: The Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee will hold a rare Friday special meeting to talk through “ Multi-family Development Incentives Through State and Local Programs, Single Family Housing Goals, and Affordable Housing Goals and Outcomes.” Maybe tune in today at 1:30 PM to see what they’re up to.
 

Correction! There are, in fact, more Charter Review Commission meetings after next week—possibly more public hearings, too. I got that wrong yesterday. NBC12’s Henry Graff has a quick recap of yesterday’s meeting, if you’re looking, and remember that the Commission is especially excited to hear your feedback at their May 23rd meeting.
 

Heads up! This coming Sunday, GRTC will update many, many routes so that they make a stop at the new Downtown Transfer Station—well, technically they’ll still serve the Temporary Transfer Plaza for the next couple of weeks while construction finishes up on the new station. If you’re used to routes that run straight through downtown, from one side of the city to the other, you better update your mental bus map to include a stop over at the Downtown Transfer Station!
 

RVA Bike Month rolls into this weekend with a full slate of events to keep you busy. Riverrock is probably the headliner—it’s hard to top three days of bikes, climbing, kayaking, music, and all sorts of other weird/extreme stuff down by the river. But if, for some reason, that’s not your jam, you can Choose Your Own Adventure for Bike to Work Day this morning, join Outpost on a Coffee Grinder gravel ride tomorrow, and make sure to stop by the Bike Swap at Stone Brewing afterwards.
 

This morning’s longread

King Charles’s Very Hobbity Coronation

To date, this is the only single thing I’ve read about the royals and their recent coronation ceremony. Did everyone already know that they have an official quiche of the British monarchy?
 

Nonetheless, King Charles is trying, in his hobbity way, to move with the times. At the coronation, the oil used to anoint him will be vegan-friendly—something that caused consternation among certain tabloids—because it will not be made with ambergris or civet musk (extracted, respectively, from whale intestines and a tree mammal’s anal glands). But family tradition comes into play too: The oil will come from olives harvested from beside the grave of Charles’s grandmother Alice, in Jerusalem. It has been blessed by an Orthodox patriarch with a huge beard.
 

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

Sometime you gotta look up!