Good morning, RVA: Land use planning, cicada realism, and two book recommendations Ross Catrow

Good morning, RVA! It's 39 °F, and temperatures bottom out today and tomorrow (as much as they can “bottom out” in the middle of spring, I guess). You should expect highs in the 50s, some sunshine to warm things up a bit, and a forced return to your sock drawer. Sunday, things start to warm up again, and then, by this coming Tuesday, we’re back to the springtime 70s. We’ve got plenty to enjoy before then though, so throw on an additional layer and spend a bit of time outside with these sunny skies!

Water cooler

Yesterday, GRTC announced they’ve won a big $750,000 grant from the Federal Transit Administration to help kick off some very important land use planning. Specifically, the money will “plan for Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) on Chamberlayne Avenue in advance of GRTC’s future North/South Pulse Bus Rapid Transit Line.” I imagine the final product will look something like 2017’s Pulse Corridor Plan, which helped the City figure our the proper land use and zoning around Broad Street ahead of actually building the Pulse. Spend six seconds driving down Chamberlayne Avenue and you’ll see a corridor with industrial sections that need drastic upzoning and sleepy sections of old single-family-home street-car suburbs. It’s a complex corridor and will need a thoughtful planning process to figure out the best way to build great transit that’s supported by great neighborhoods.

Also, did you catch that GRTC called this north-south BRT the “Pulse” too? I think that’s the first time I’ve seen “Pulse” used when referring to this new potential line. That makes the most sense to me; we don’t need to have cute names for each and every bus rapid transit line we build. We will, however, need some sort of way to differentiate these lines eventually—by color or number or something. Cardinal direction won’t work when we have a bunch of these things running diagonally across the region.

Also also, it’ll be interesting to see how this planning process takes advantage of (or runs up against) the upcoming zoning ordinance rewrite.

Virginia Tech is out here throwing cold water on my plans to spend the back half of April taking hundreds of photos of cicadas from Brood XIX as they crawl out from wherever it is they’ve been for the last 13 years. Apparently we may be a little too far north which “makes it difficult to predict where Brood XIX cicadas will emerge.” Tap through to see a comparison photo between regular, annual cicadas (still cool) and the periodic variety (way more mysterious). The former are black and green, while the latter are more reddish in color.

John Murden at South Richmond News has a picture of Richmond’s oldest frame house. Built in the late 1750s it sits at what is now 5613 Kildare Drive. First, that’s way further west than I would have expected for this sort of Richmond history! Second, it’s kind of wild that houses from 300 years ago just look like houses from today. I guess we’ve kind of settled on what a “house” looks like?

Friends of the Richmond Public Library will host their annual spring book sale today through Sunday down at the Main Library (101 E. Franklin Street). Stop by this weekend and find something new to throw on top of that ever-growing stack of books on your nightstand. Proceeds benefit Richmond Public Library programming, which is broad and vast and important to our communities!

If you’re looking for recommendations, two books I just finished:

Interior Chinatown which I absolutely loved. It’s weird, interesting, funny, and thoughtful.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is set in the far future (or deep past?), and while it’s definitely a science fiction novella, it’s one of the most romantic things I’ve read in the past (or future!) forever.

A look back

Reading through my COVID-19 update from April 5th, 2022, I was reminded that today, in 2024, you can still monitor the COVID-19 levels in wastewater across the country via this nice page on the CDC’s website. In fact, nationally, the wastewater viral activity level for COVID-19 is low for the first time since last summer. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s no COVID-19 swirling around in your specific community, but it does mean that it’s probably safer—at least as far as coronaviruses go—to travel across the country for an eclipse than it has been in a while. Honestly, the biggest risk to your safety if you’re eclipsebound is probably the long drive across America’s highway system.

This morning's longread

'Whatever the hell is west of Roanoke.' Them's fighting words!

Earlier this week, Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond wrote a throw-away line about Virginia’s different regions, listing them out as: “Richmond, NoVa, Hampton Roads, Charlottesville, Roanoke and whatever the hell is west of Roanoke.” In response, Cardinal News, an independent news site the that covers Southwest and Southside Virginia, wrote this really nice piece explaining exactly whatever the hell is west of Roanoke and why it’s a lovely and important part of the Commonwealth.

I understand why it’s easy to dismiss the western part of the state. We’re a long way away from Richmond — and lots of other places. Roanoke is closer to two other state capitals than it is to our own, and the numbers go up from there. By the time you get out to Ewing in western Lee County, you’re closer to nine other state capitals than our own. Distance creates different perspectives: A study a few years ago by two geographers found that, based on commuting patterns, the western part of the state was economically disconnected from the rest of Virginia — we tend to look south to North Carolina or west to Tennessee. It’s not just our rivers that run west and south; so do our people. The whole controversy over whether the Wizards and Capitals would move to Virginia meant very little out here. Those aren’t the teams we root for.

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

What an excellent logo and paint job on this bike!