Good morning, RVA: Fall Line Trail updates, Mayo Island’s official, and a bummer quote

Henrico County is fully stoked on the Fall Line Trail.

Good morning, RVA! It's 39 °F, and once the rain starts this morning, it probably won’t stop until I’m already in bed for the night. Along with heavy precipitation, you should expect unseasonably warm temperatures this afternoon and lots of wind—with gusts that could reach 50 mph this evening! I’m not really sure what to make of today’s weather, but it sure looks unpleasant. Keep it in mind if you’ve got plans tonight.

Water cooler

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Eric Kolenich has all sorts of new-to-me details on the Fall Line Trail, particularly Henrico’s plans to build a bunch of trailheads. You can tell from the speed at which they’re putting together all these different pieces, that Henrico County is fully stoked on the Fall Line. They’ve purchased land, thought through connector trails to other developments, planned multiple trailheads—it’s impressive! At some point, Richmond will need to start making similar moves and plans, too. I imagine that process will be a lot more...hands on...than Henrico’s.

I’d thought this had already happened, but the City officially signed off on the deal to buy Mayo Island yesterday, and Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense has the report. Eventually, we’ll see the seven acres of asphalt covering the island replaced with an actual, public park, but first the City will work with a few other stakeholders who made the purchase possible to come up with a timeline to rip out the 625 parking spaces that currently cover the island’s surface. I’m interested in how the City and the other stakeholders—like the Capital Region Land Conservancy and Department of Conservation and Recreation—puts together the the planning process for this unique, massive space (it’s more than twice as big as Brown’s Island!). Our latest stab at what to do with the island was way back in 2012 with the Richmond Riverfront Plan—it’s pretty vague and 12 years old at this point.

A small City Council FYI: Yesterday, they adopted ORD. 2023-369, a series of small tweaks to TOD-1 zoning which mostly smooth the way for the Diamond District redevelopment. It’s officially the first ordinance to pass in 2024 that I had on my GMRVA Legislation Tracker Trello board.

Michael Martz at the RTD reports on the Governor’s plan to severely underfund Washington D.C.’s public transportation system unless they, I dunno, do better? I mostly link to it to share this huge bummer of a quote from Virginia’s Secretary of Transportation: “We look forward to continuing our work with you on ensuring that WMATA takes the necessary steps to reduce costs, improve fare collection, and reasonably right-size service to demand so it can more efficiently and effectively meet the needs of the region.” Reducing costs, blaming fare collection (which is a relatively small portion of a transit agency’s total budget), and anything with the word “right-size” in it are all code for defunding public transportaiton—probably with the intention of making the service less useful for folks which, in turn, reduces ridership and fare revenue, which, in turn, repeats forever and ever amen. Setting aside whether WMATA needs more money from the State (although it almost certainly does), it’s frustrating to see the State’s Top Person In Charge of Transportation out here making anti-transit statements like this. I hope Richmond can fly under this man’s radar for the rest of his term.

Via /r/rva, an important update: Here’s a picture of the pizza made in the new General Assembly building’s pizza oven—it looks pretty good!

This morning's longread
The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again

I don’t think I’m as optimistic as Anil Dash in his column about how the current decentralization of social media will lead us back to the wild and weird era of the internet. But! Reading this gave me a little bit of hope and made me want to start a weird new side project.

Consider the dramatic power shift happening right now in social media. Twitter’s slide into irrelevance and extremism as it decays into X has hastened the explosive growth of a whole host of newer social networks. There’s the nerdy vibes of the noncommercial Mastodon communities (each one with its own set of Dungeons and Dragons rules to play by), the raucous hedonism of Bluesky (like your old Tumblr timeline at its most scandalous), and the at-least-it’s-not-LinkedIn noisiness of Threads, brought to you by Instagram, meaning Facebook, meaning Meta. There are lots more, of course, and probably another new one popping up tomorrow, but that’s what’s great about it. A generation ago, we saw early social networks like LiveJournal and Xanga and Black Planet and Friendster and many others come and go, each finding their own specific audience and focus. For those who remember a time in the last century when things were less homogenous, and different geographic regions might have their own distinct music scenes or culinary traditions, it’s easy to understand the appeal of an online equivalent to different, connected neighborhoods that each have their own vibe. While this new, more diffuse set of social networks sometimes requires a little more tinkering to get started, they epitomize the complexity and multiplicity of the weirder and more open web that’s flourishing today.

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Picture of the Day

Excellent shadow work.