Good morning, RVA: Richmond Connects, another transportation plan, and bamboo

Good Morning, RVA!

Good morning, RVA! It's 31 °F, and, what the heck, I thought we’d fully moved on to spring. While I sit over here hoping my about-to-bloom azaleas make it through this mini cold snap, you can expect clear skies and highs in the mid 50s today. Looks like we might have one or two more potential overnight freezes ahead of us this week, so fingers crossed for the little plants out there!

Water cooler

Today both the Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee and the Planning Commission meet for some good ol’ fashioned regularly scheduled meetings.

Land Use, Housing and Transportation will consider RES. 2024-R011, which would adopt Richmond Connects as the “official comprehensive transportation plan for the City of Richmond.” This is super exciting! The City hasn’t updated their official transportation plan in a ton of years, and we’re way past due for an update. The Richmond Connects team has put together a good plan—one that centers equity, community, and action—and, if you’d like, you can reach out to your City Council reps in support of it (or just to thank everyone for their hard work). After LUHT recommends this paper, which I think they totally will, it’ll head over to full Council to make it official official in the coming weeks.

Later in the evening, Planning Commission will discuss, of course, a million SUPs because we really need to clean up our zoning, but they’ll also weigh in on the plans to transform Blackwell Park “by adding and renovating site features that promote community-preferred recreation activities and site elements. The primary improvements include sports fields and courts, a permeable parking lot, and a fitness trail.” Check out some of the diagrams and renderings in the final plan PDF. I have a special place in my heart for parks with full football fields—including uprights!

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Speaking of transportation plans (whenever am I not!), our regional transportation planning group, PlanRVA, hosted a forum last week to kick off their multi-year effort to put together a multi-decade regional transportation plan. VPM’s Ian M. Stewart has the details, including the note that PlanRVA should have a prioritized list of long-term infrastructure projects—like, over the next 25 years—by this coming April. What even will the world look like in 25 years? Who can say, but here’s what I can say with certainty: We’ll still need more bus service and fewer highways.

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Maybe Henrico’s County manager was miffed about the recently released Census population numbers because of articles like this one by Eric Kolenich at the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “This Richmond-area county among fastest-growing in U.S.”? Spoiler: It’s not Henrico! But, I dunno, do people really move to a place because it shows up on “fastest-growing county” listicles? Probably not. My money’s still on the money—that the Census (supposedly) shortchanging Henrico on population numbers means fewer dollars coming in at some point or in some way.

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The best thing I learned last year was bamboo’s fascinating lifecycle and, for awhile, I couldn’t stop talking about it (OK, I am still always talking about it). That said, I do not want bamboo anywhere near my yard, because once it gets established, good luck getting rid of it. See this post on /r/rva: “We have bamboo in our backyard. We hate it. We spend so much time every year chopping it down, digging up the roots, and searching the internet for ways to prevent it growing back. All methods have failed. With spring time coming, new shoots have popped up, and it instantly enraged us.” A helpful commenter responds: “I have conquered a 30x80 patch of bamboo. It's just takes daily dedication for years...You can win, but you have to be stronger and more disciplined than the bamboo.” Amazing.

A look back

Three years ago yesterday, Mayor Stoney got his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine as Virginia opened up vaccination eligibility to the “Phase 1b” group. Remember all the phases?? And remember waiting and waiting for your turn to come around? Remember people chasing down vaccine appointments across the state through “vax hunter” Facebook groups? What a time!

This morning's longread

AI news that's fit to print

Zach Seward is the NYT’s “Editorial Director of A.I. Initiatives,” and in this piece he lays out some bad, decent, and interesting uses of AI in news. None of these really flipped my switches—especially the generative AI examples—but they did get close. The below excerpt describes a fully automated (and very low stakes) data dashboard that uses generative AI to title and describe some of the charts. That feels adjacent to a good use of the technology to me.

The data and charts are fully automated. The site tries to highlight charts that are showing interesting data, like an outlier, or particularly strong growth or decline. So far, cool but basic math. Where LLMs play a role is in providing context: the headlines and other brief copy that appear around the charts to help readers understand what they're looking at—The air quality in New York today is good, subway ridership is still below pre-pandemic levels, but on the bright side, our fight against rats is showing progress. These are really focused use cases for an LLM, and the fact that a bot wrote these reports is fully disclosed. It's not a deep investigation into the war on rats, which I'd love to read, too, but it's a certainly a helpful way to keep tabs on one's city.

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Picture of the Day

Perfect!