Good morning, RVA: Concrete balls, new merch, and some ways to fill your weekend

The huge concrete balls on Bank Street make me so angry.

Good morning, RVA! It's 59 °F, and I think today might be the last of these warm, summery October days. Expect highs in the mid 80s, some sunshine, and then rain to move in tomorrow bringing with it much cooler temperatures. Highs in the 60s on Sunday!

Water cooler

Y'all know that I am extremely frustrated by the State's Department of General Services and their decision to block off Bank Street with that stupid Cold War-era border gate and those huge concrete balls. Bank Street was, is, and will be the critical bike connection between the Franklin Street Bike Lane in the west and the 17th Street Market/Capital Trail in the east. The current state of affairs, forcing people on bikes to weave through an obstacle course of gates and balls is already unacceptable and a great example of how the State just kind of does whatever they want in Richmond (see also: the horrible fencing at Marcus-David Peters Circle). Yesterday, I got an email from Bike Walk RVA pointing me to these proposed regulations that would close Capitol Square to the public from 9:00 PM–6:00 AM. It doesn't take much to envision a potential future where the State closes Bank Street entirely to through traffic, incorporates it into "Capitol Square," and completely fractures Richmond's network of bike lanes. If you have a minute, please leave a comment on these regulations requesting that Bank Street remain a part of the public right-of-way and open to pedestrian and bike through traffic 24/7.

Richmond Public Schools launched a new website yesterday, always a terrifying task. As boring as "information architecture" sounds, the information on a website's homepage is a quick shorthand for that organization's priorities. It's like budgets, but with words instead of dollars. Two things stick out to me from this recent RPS website reorg: The Superintendent's newsletter is right there at the top, and there's a whole section dedicated to the Dreams4RPS strategic plan. To help celebrate the launch, RPS has new merch designs over in their Bonfire store. Do I need a 3/4 sleeve baseball Tee featuring a colorful map of the RPS middle school zones? Obviously.

I...don't know what to keep saying about Virginia's attempt at redistricting, but stuff keeps happening so I feel like I should keep linking to it. Today, the Virginia Mercury's Bob Lewis has an update on the Commission's progress (?) on redrawing the State's Congressional Districts.

Tonight at 6:30 PM, you can join the Institute for Contemporary Art (in-person or live on YouTube) for a conversation with the creators of and contributors to the Richmond Racial Equity Essays project. Check out this impressive list of panelists that's sure to get you clicking on your calendar: Ebony Walden, Duron Chavis, Enjoli Moon, Trey Hartt, Kendra Jones, Nastassja Swift, Janine Yvette Bell, and Eva Rocha. If you haven't yet read the collection of essays Ebony Walden put together, you can do so here or even listen to her podcast series or watch a series of video interviews. Dig in! It's more than enough content to get you through a rainy Saturday.

Fingers crossed for a break in the weather so folks can attend this Shockoe Walking Tour on Saturday at 11:00 AM hosted by the Partnership for Smarter Growth. PSG will walk folks around the part of town covered by the Shockoe Small Area Plan and will discuss both how the plan will impact the neighborhood and how the neighborhood can get involved. You can check out the beefy, 216-page, pre-final plan here if you want to do some pre-tour homework or if you just want some more light reading for your weekend.

This morning's longread
The Ship That Became a Bomb

This longread is fascinating, terrifying, and a good lesson in some geopolitics that I had no idea about.

Soon, a vast, decrepit oil tanker in the Red Sea will likely sink, catch fire, or explode. The vessel, the F.S.O. Safer—pronounced “Saffer”—is named for a patch of desert near the city of Marib, in central Yemen, where the country’s first reserves of crude oil were discovered. In 1987, the Safer was redesigned as a floating storage-and-off-loading facility, or F.S.O., becoming the terminus of a pipeline that began at the Marib oil fields and proceeded westward, across mountains and five miles of seafloor. The ship has been moored there ever since, and recently it has degraded to the verge of collapse. More than a million barrels of oil are currently stored in its tanks. The Exxon Valdez spilled about a quarter of that volume when it ran aground in Alaska, in 1989.

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