Good morning, RVA: New bike lanes, new map, and Pipeline is back!

So much sewer and pipe-related news today—it’s infrastructure week!

Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F, and today looks lovely. Expect highs in the upper 60s and lots of sunshine. The rest of this week looks warm and wonderful, too—enjoy!

Water cooler

Richmond’s City Council will meet today for their regularly scheduled meeting, and you can find the entire agenda here. The annual ordinance the City must pass to keep the real estate tax rate at $1.20 sits on the regular agenda and should easily pass. Of note, Councilmember Trammel’s competing paper, ORD. 2021-286, which would lower the real estate tax to $1.135, also appears on the regular agenda. I think it’s fascinatingly inconsistent that someone who was pro-Casino because of the non-gambling investment it would bring to Richmond would simultaneously submit a paper that would strip a huge amount of revenue from the city’s budget. Council’s Finance and Economic Development committee has recommended that Trammell’s paper be stricken.

It’s infrastructure week! After laying some fresh pavement, Richmond’s Department of Public Works will begin installing new bike lanes across the city. Specifically, you’ll see new infrastructure pop up on: Brookland Parkway, Marshall Street from 29th to 21st, Walmsley Boulevard (from the city line to Belmont), and Warwick Road (from Hull to Richmond Highway). This is great news, and quick work by DPW in moving from public engagement, to paving, to bike laning. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait on the proposed Colorado Avenue bike lane as that street was removed from the paving schedule. Double unfortunately, “based on feedback received, DPW will not move forward with the proposed bike lane project on Grove Avenue [from Shadwell to Seneca] at this time.” That’s a bummer. You can see the polarized results from this past summer’s public engagement process on page 19 of this PDF. About the same number of respondents super hated and strongly supported the very fast, wide, and dangerous existing conditions. In the end, though, slightly more respondents opposed replacing the parking lane with a bike lane, and parking wins again. Idk, wild idea here, what if we removed a travel lane and kept the parking—just like Brook Road? That seems to have worked just fine.

Eric Kolenich at the RTD has some fun combined sewer news, which, as you know, is some of my favorite news. The Department of Public Utilities has created this neat public, realtime map of combined sewer overflow events, and you should just bookmark that thing right now. As of this morning, everything looks clear and not-overflowed, but lets check back in this weekend when we’ve got some rain in the forecast.

Also in pipe-related news, @rvah2o reports that the Pipeline Trail is now open! The pipe, which actively carries stormwater and wastewater and Richmonders catching one of the best views of the James River, had closed back in the summer for repairs to some leaky sections (gross). Check out the aforelinked thread to see what 677.48 square feet of mesh and epoxy looks like on an enormous 43” diameter pipe.

RVAgreen 2050’s October newsletter came out a couple weeks back, and you should give it a read (and a subscribe if you haven’t already). I really enjoy the “Flash Survey” feature—a new, literally two-minute survey you can take each month on topics connected to RVAgreen 2050’s work. This month’s survey focuses on creating less landfill waste. I love it! Easy and quick surveys like this can unlock a bunch of interesting information bound up in our communities, like: Last month about 30% of respondents said they had decided not to heat or cool their home at least once because they were worried about paying the resulting utility bills.

It is actually Infrastructure Week, though, because Congress passed Biden’s big infrastructure bill over the weekend. This is not the promised Build Back Better bill, which still lacks the necessary votes to pass—but, apparently that’s also been sorted out? We’ll learn more in the coming days/weeks, I guess.

This morning's longread
The curious case of the ancient whale bones

Science!

If this were a fresh crime scene, he could have rooted around in the whale’s guts, found a bunch of toxins, and caught the red tide red-handed. But because his crime scene was millions of years old, he could only study his photographic models instead. Those kept showing that the whale skeletons were surrounded by rings of orange sediment — mats of iron oxide, which Pyenson interprets as possible algae in the fossil record. “I kept on wondering, is this the algae of death?” Pyenson says with a laugh. His team brought samples of this orange sediment back to the US and examined them under an electron microscope. The images included tiny spheres that were the right size to be an algae of death, Pyenson says, but all their distinguishing features had been wiped away by millions of years.

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