Good morning, RVA: Getting ready for budget season, early voting, and the best fries

I eat a lot of Cobra Cabana fries and certainly love them, but, ever since
Greenleaf’s Pool Room closed, I’m still looking for my new favorite.

Good morning, RVA! It's 38 °F, and today looks chilly with highs topping out around 50 °F sometime later this afternoon. You can also expect the sun to come out and, with any luck, dry up all of yesterday’s soggy rain. Look forward to more of the same—with maybe some more clouds—for the rest of the week.

Water cooler

City Council meets today for their first real, full meeting of 2023, and you can find the agenda here. It’s a pretty full agenda—31 total items—but all of them live on the Consent portion. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen an empty Regular Agenda. Also Council-related, check out this overview of the City’s budget put together by Steve Skinner, City Council’s public information officer. It’s filled with lots of neat facts to tide you over until we officially kick off this year’s budget season—which should be sometime soon with the superintendent’s presentation of needs to the RPS School Board. Of course, last year, getting the School Board to actually approve their budget so the Mayor could introduce his budget, was a whole situation. I’m looking forward to less situations this year, to be honest!

Megan Pauly at VPM has a good explainer on Governor Youngkin’s newest plan to defund public schools, this time through a program he’s calling “education savings accounts.” Here’s just a couple of the quotes from the experts Pauly talked to: “Voucher programs [like the education savings accounts] give money to private schools and private education providers that can discriminate, and pick and choose which students they want to admit, pick and choose whether they're going to discipline students for things like their sexual orientation, and pick and choose whether they're going to offer things like special education to students who need it” and “Chad Stewart, Virginia Education Association’s policy analyst, points out that the funds families could receive through an ESA account would cover a fraction of the cost of most private schools in the state.“ and “Rob Shand, a professor of education policy at American University, has studied voucher programs in other states and said they tend to most greatly benefit more affluent families.“ So whatever blah-blah-blah you may hear about this or similar programs, remember that the consistent goal of this administration—and Republicans nationwide—is the systematic dismantling of our public schools. I still don’t think Virginia’s Senate has even the smallest interest in this sort of thing (although someone did remind me that it’s difficult to predict what Sen. Morrissey will do with any given bill).

Early voting for Virginia’s 4th Congressional District—aka the seat Sen. Jennifer McClellan is running for—started this past Friday. You can stop by your local registrar’s office to cast your ballot at any point from now until the Saturday before the election (February 18th). Sen. McClellan has put together a nice timeline of all the various voting dates leading up to her election if you need a handy reference.

Local Internet Person Taber has a really neat video he took of Ethan Hawke running through Jackson Ward while filming Raymond and Ray that he then synced up with the actual scene from the movie. I think this is GMRVA’s first Mastodon link!

I have to link to this every time it comes up on /r/rva: Who has the best fries in RVA? I eat a lot of Cobra Cabana’s fries and certainly love them, but, ever since Greenleaf’s Pool Room closed, I’m still looking for my new favorite.

This morning's longread
American transit agencies should prioritize ridership over other goals

Last week Matthew Yglesias wrote about public transit’s twin goals of ridership and coverage. If you were a transit planner and you decided to focus on ridership, you’d put as much service on the busiest streets to encourage as many folks to ride as possible. If you wanted to focus on coverage, you’d send service squiggling out into the nooks and crannies of neighborhoods, making sure as many folks as possible had access to at least some sort of service. With limited transit budgets, these goals are often in conflict and communities need to decide where on the ridership-coverage spectrum they want to live. Yglesias argues for always prioritizing ridership, and, in a lot of ways he’s not wrong. But not in every way! Stay tuned because tomorrow, I’ll link to transit planner Jarrett Walker’s response (you may remember Walker from Richmond’s bus system redesign a couple years back).

But I’m a columnist and I’m here to say that it’s a shame that so many cities spend non-trivial sums of money on bus systems that few people ride. Even if the transit agencies had clear mandates to prioritize increasing ridership, they would of course make mistakes — nobody’s judgment is flawless and the United States of America does not have a culture of strong and successful transit agencies. But every agency’s existing personnel are good enough at their jobs to see that some pro-ridership changes are being left on the table due to considerations like “I don’t want to get yelled at at a community meeting.” Telling agencies to prioritize ridership would result in ridership going up, and over time, it would also create an agency culture focused on improving ridership and learning what strategies do and do not work.

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Picture of the Day

Eastbound morning commute is intense.