Good morning, RVA: Walk-up vaccinations, Richmond 300 amendments, and a new place

Take a walk or a roll through the intersection of W. Marshall and Brook to
check out the new plaza, mural, and parklet!

Good morning, RVA! It's 37 °F, and today looks absolutely lovely. You can expect sunshine, highs in the 70s, bikes, long walks in the park, naps in the hammock, and a quiet evening on the porch.

Water cooler

I’ve got good news if you or a member of your family still needs a COVID-19 vaccine but making an appointment seems like a huge drag. As of yesterday, anyone can walk up to any of the vaccination clinics hosted by the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts and get vaccinated without an appointment—this includes boosters and kids aged 5–11. Here’s the huge list of events taking place over the next couple of weeks, should you need it.

Yesterday, City Council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee up and voted to send RES. 2021-R026, the laundry list of Richmond 300 amendments, to full Council with a recommendation to approve. This will be the first time since April that the poorly-thought-out resolution has done anything other than bounce around between Council and committee. To be clear, since I’ve been writing about this for over 200 days now and it’s easy to forget what’s happening, RES. 2021-R026 is not even actual amendments. It’s a resolution asking the Planning Commission to take this eight-page list of conflicting and confusing bullets and do the massive amount of work to turn them into a cohesive set of actual master plan amendments. Don’t take my word for it: Back in July, Maritza Pechin, who ran the entire Richmond 300 process and now serves as the Deputy Director of the Office of Equitable Development, put together this incredibly comprehensive memo outlining why most of Council’s bullets are either already in the plan, out of scope for a master plan, or a fundamental change that deserve a more serious community engagement process than a single, sloppy list submitted to the Planning Commission. Setting aside that there were literal years for City Council to get involved in building the master plan with their constituents, councilmembers can, today, draft thoughtful, specific amendments to the master plan and then work with the City on running the appropriate community engagement around those amendments. It’d take awhile to arrive at some sort of consensus, sure, but would it take fewer than 200 days? Maybe!

Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers reports that Carvana’s car vending machine is now open for business. Y’all know how I feel about cars, but I guess a very dense, 12-story parking lot is better than a spread-out, surface parking lot? Will it always be filled with brightly-colored sports cars? I dunno, but I can’t stop looking at it.

Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has an early look at the State’s upcoming budget, which includes “$13 billion in additional state revenues this year and in the next two fiscal years.” With all the new Republican leadership, Martz expects lots of funding for uninspiring tax cuts. We’ll see if Governor-elect Youngkin’s promise to “return excellence to the classroom” involves things like increased state funding for teach salaries and forking over the million and millions of dollars needed to modernize school facilities across the state.

Today at 2:00 PM, the City and Venture Richmond will officially cut the ribbon on a new parklet, plaza, and street mural at the intersection of Brook Road and W. Marshall Streets, right in front of Gallery5 and Art 180. Interesting and of note, “Local artist Chris Visions designed the mural, which references the rich history of Jackson Ward and the neighborhood’s enduring mission to carry on a legacy of Black excellence. The design is based on the Sankofa, an Andikra symbol from Ghana meaning ‘to go back and retrieve/get,’ and the colors echo the red, black and green of the Pan-African flag. ART 180 youth painted the mural as part of the culmination of their Community Program earlier this fall.” I rode through that intersection the other day, and it’s just a really great example of how thoughtful placemaking can add life to a corridor. That couple of blocks of Marshall, down through Adams, has such excellent vibes at the moment, and I can really see it becoming a destination mini-neighborhood as more retail and residential continue to pop up. Check out a picture of the mural (and lovely new hi-viz crosswalks) in front of Gallery5 and the really wonderful (and big!) parklet in front of Art 180. Great work, everyone!

This morning's longread
Before Interstates, America Got Around on Interurbans

What if we had electric trains connecting every town everywhere? Oh wait, we did over 100 years ago! Also, no article about electric trains would be complete without mentioning how they were invented in Richmond—which makes me simultaneously happy and sad as I look around at the husk of our regional public transportation system.

At a time when most Americans still lived in rural communities, interurbans were the most convenient way to travel. Small-town residents could ride to the closest city for a day trip. Traveling salesmen used them to hop from town to town. The electrified lines offered a cleaner ride than coal-fired steam engines, and they were fast, too, with many reaching what we now consider “highway speeds” of 60 mph or more as they raced through the countryside. (By comparison, a Ford Model T’s top speed was around 45 mph, if you could find a stretch of straight road to wind it out.) “If you were on a main line, like between Cleveland and Toledo, you had a lot of choices,” Grant says. “But if you were out in a smaller community, you might only get one train a day, and that might not run on Sunday. But with interurbans, you had trains running every hour or two hours.”

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