Good morning, RVA: The need for a CRB and a Marcus Alert, bridges, and single-use plastic

Unsurprising to everyone, I have lots of thoughts on Richmond’s bridges.

Good morning, RVA! It's 51 °F and rainy. You can expect the rain to continue through this morning, the clouds to stick around until later this afternoon, and the temperatures to stay pretty consistent until the sun sets.

Chris Saurez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on yet another reason Richmond needs a Civilian Review Board to monitor police behavior. Last month, as police were arresting a woman who “appeared to be homeless” near the Whole Foods on Broad Street, another woman started recording that interaction. From the piece: “[The woman recording the interaction] says police forced her to the ground and left her with cuts, bruises and an injured elbow. Police say she injured herself.” You can watch the video yourself here, which escalates until a police officer says “stop” and takes her phone. Lots of things bother me about this video, and we really need a functioning Marcus Alert system to have folks other than armed police officers available to respond to calls like this.

Twitter user @3StripeStrife put up a quick poll about the safety of riding bikes across Richmond’s bridges, and, if you’ve ever done so yourself, you will not be surprised by the results. The poll has an admittedly small _n_ (about 60ish folks), but you know there’s a larger issue when 92% of people says yes to “Does comfort and safety of biking over any of these four bridges influence your decisions in going to activities, businesses, working in or living where you have to cross a bridge.” I agree, I’m one of the 92%, and so I’ve got bridge hot takes! The Nickel Bridge, while beautiful, needs to be replaced. It can’t support bus traffic and the current teensy pedestrian/bike sidewalk is unsafe and terrifying—I always feel like I’m going to fly right over the railing into the river! I think plans to replace this bridge do exist in some form or another. The Mayo Bridge, also terrifying, always shows up on the “super old infrastructure that probably has exceeded its useful lifespan lists.” It carries a ton of traffic, and I’m not sure you could take a lane for bikes without screwing up a very important and frequent bus route (although folks have wanted to put a light rail across that thing for decades, which would take a ton of space away from car traffic). The other two bridges are literal enormous highways because when they were built we thought it’d be amazing to pour thousands of speeding vehicles directly into our downtown, so we built enormous bridges in anticipation of future highways. Fortunately, the highways never materialized, but now we just have these six-lane monsters that are under-used and incredibly unsafe. These two bridges, Belvidere and 9th, aren’t going anywhere, but, luckily, are easy-ish to fix: Take a lane on either side, block it off in its entirety with concrete barricades, and call it a day. The entries and exits for bikes and pedestrians would need some thoughtful consideration, but lessening the amount of Mad Max: Fury Road while riding across these bridges is pretty straightforward. Anyway, the best part of this Twitter poll/thread is that two Councilmembers (Jordan and Addison) agreed to take a ride across these horrible bridges and think on how to make them safer (if they survive the crossings, of course).

Via a reader whose keen eyes for PDFs and archaic government websites see even further than my own: the City of Richmond has put out a bid for the removal of the A.P. Hill monument at Laburnum and Hermitage. Remember, the corpse of actual A.P. Hill lies under that intersection, so part of the removal process will include an exhuming. It’s morbid, but...I am interested in this? The bid closes on December 6th, so maybe we say goodbye to our last big, racist monument early next year.

The Virginia Mercury’s Sarah Vogelsong has an update on Executive Order 77, which directed state agencies to start eliminating single-use plastics. I know this feels like nibbling around at the edges, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. I mean, this seems like a great step in the right direction: “Virginia’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority said in its plan that it’s working to replace roughly 2 million plastic bags used a month with reusable bags by December 2022.” That’s a lot of plastic that just won’t end up in landfills anymore! We’ll see if incoming Republicans are willing to sustain these plans or if they will wrap them in a plastic bag and toss them in a landfill.

A great piece by local Mariia Zimmerman walking through the details of President Biden’s new infrastructure bill and how we could—if we’re serious about it—use these new, huge investments to improve transportation for those who need it most.

Economic mobility, as the name suggests, is quite literally tied to the ability to access jobs and broader elements of life easily and affordably: government services, healthcare, education, goods and services, family, faith and recreation. Yet mobility and accessibility is not evenly shared. Take car ownership and the fact that nearly every city urban or rural now requires access to an automobile to hold a job, see a doctor, and access broader regional opportunities. While auto ownership has increased significantly over the past 40 years, almost a quarter of low-income households lack access to a car. Auto ownership by race shows additional disparities. Nationally, in 2019 only 6% of White households do not own a car, while the percentage for both Asian and Latino households is 11%; over 18% of Black households do not own or lack access to an automobile.

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