Unlocking Church Hill's pedal-pushing potential

It’s prime bike-riding weather, and Church Hill is prime bike-riding territory. Or, it could be. I just took my old 18-speed out for a twilight jaunt up to Oakwood Cemetery the other night, and even on that short ride on the neighborhood’s non-arterial streets, I clocked a couple cars running stop signs and had to swerve once to avoid getting doored.

I’ve ridden bikes for work and fun throughout my entire adult life, including almost a decade in New York City and four years in Charleston, South Carolina. And now almost three years here. I’d rate Richmond somewhere between those two cities on road design, bike-lane infrastructure, and driver hostility?² Ish? I was always much more comfortable riding in NYC than Charleston: the latter’s road surfaces are in horrendous condition, bike lanes barely exist, and drivers are both less familiar with and less amenable to sharing space with cyclists. Richmond isn’t quite that gnarly a place to ride, but it’s not, like, good, on balance. And that goes for the East End, too.

“It’s the good and the bad,” Alex Fisher, the Church Hill resident behind the beloved citywide cycling event Ride and Dive, told The Lookout in a phone interview in August. “We have some really great separated bike lanes, and then we have some that are frankly terrible […] just a stripe of paint in the gutter.”

Or as Joseph Carlisle, a local cyclist and co-lead of RVA YIMBY, put it when recounting for The Lookout the harrowing brush with a road-raging FedEx driver earlier this year: “Paint doesn't mean protection.”

Earlier this year, PlanRVA launched the Near Miss Dashboard, an interactive digital map that allows pedestrians and cyclists to log locations of dangerous road conditions, “near misses,” and full-blown accidents. Pretty grim stuff, and not exactly a shining example of progressive transit policy to ask cyclists to document their own endangerment, but then again, Richmond is hardly the only city in America to treat everything besides the automobile as an afterthought. (If not a straightforward nuisance.) So here we are.

“A major thing that we want to come out of it is (to) take the data and provide our localities with information from the dashboard in a short report that would give them some hotspots of activity,” Elizabeth Greenwell, a data analyst at PlanRVA who helped build the Near Miss Dashboard, told The Virginia Mercury recently. It’s a laudable goal. But with only 184 entries since the tool launched in March, data collection is going slow, so if you have incidents to log, get in there, I guess.¹ My review of the tool’s few logged incidents last month revealed more or less what any East End cyclist could have told you from experience. Danger zones are clustered around N. 25th St. and E. Broad St. in Church Hill proper, and around The Intersection of Doom™️ (E. Broad & N. 18th Sts.) down in Shockoe Bottom. Sure, that tracks.

As with having schoolchildren paint murals on Mosby Street in hopes of slowing drivers down, the Near Miss Dashboard is a nice enough idea, and I don’t think there’s any harm in it. But when there isn’t “truly functional bike lane in all of Richmond”—an only slightly exaggerated claim from a local cyclist that led a Richmond Times-Dispatch report on the dangers of riding citywide last week—the problem isn’t really a lack of data. It’s the lack of aggressive enforcement on reckless drivers (speeders, stop-sign scofflaws, illegal parkers that rob intersections of daylight…), investment in properly designed and maintained non-car infrastructure, and a general sense of urgency from elected officials and city administrators to address the same.

The stakes are high even if you’ve never cycled around the neighborhood, and never plan to. Regardless of how Richmond’s current rezoning process pans out, it’s likely that our neighborhood will be zoned for more dense development it currently has. Which means more people, which means more demand for transit. Bikes can help reduce traffic from private vehicles, and because they’re so much more affordable, they can be a mobility boon for younger residents and those on fixed incomes. But it takes sustained investments in infrastructure and maintenance to reduce the risks of riding shoulder-to-quarter panel with a three-ton pickup truck. Otherwise, only the most seasoned cyclists will feel comfortable riding through Church Hill.

“Without an actual dedicated, connected network of [protected] bike lanes, you'll have people who are a little more hesitant to bike, or choose not to bike at all,” Carlisle told me back in May, shortly after his own near-miss. “That's another car on the road.” And a missed opportunity, too.

📜 Possum Poetry

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to [email protected]. All submissions anonymous!

📍Visualizing the East End’s tax delinquency

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Samuel B. Parker dropped a doozy of a scoop the other day, reporting that the city simply hasn’t bothered to collect at least $31 million in unpaid property taxes. What? No! …Yes? Parker:

Listen, your humble Lookout editor doesn’t know much about running a government, but this seems… ah, not ideal? Particularly given some city leaders—including Mayor Danny Avula and City Council President/7th District councilmember Cynthia Newbille—are insisting that the city simply can’t afford not to keep its property-tax rate locked at $1.20 per $100 of assessed value for another year. Those calls for fiscal discipline ring a smidge hollow when we’re leaving mountains of cash on the table! City Council is meeting to decide this year’s great property-tax debate early next week. In the meantime, if you’re curious to know where all these delinquent properties are, you can take a spin through the city’s Open Data Portal.³ Or maybe don’t, if it’s just going to make you angry.

👂 RPD claims it’s not interested in Flock’s new eavesdropping update

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a longtime nonprofit advocacy group for digital civil liberties, reported earlier this month that Flock Safety—the private, for-profit company that makes the surveillance devices you see atop slender black poles throughout the East End and the rest of the city—is now marketing an upgrade that enables its “Raven” gunshot detectors to listen for human voices. Via EFF (emphasis mine):

Flock is currently soliciting applications from customers for “early access” to this new feature. The Richmond Police Department signed a ~$400,000 contract with the Georgia-based firm for ~100 devices and use of its software last year, and has repeatedly insisted the cameras and microphones are useful public-safety tools despite evidence from other jurisdictions suggesting otherwise, the fact that Flock’s massive, AI-searchable database has been exploited by federal anti-immigrations forces, sheriffs, and local cops across the country (and throughout Virginia, and here in Richmond) to track and target people for harassment and deportation. But for now, the department claims no interest in Flock’s sketchy new listening function. “The Richmond Police Department does not have any plans to pursue the use of that feature,” spokesperson James Mercante told The Lookout earlier this week.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• It’s lit: Triple Crossing is bringing back the firepits for its Fulton Fridays event series, the first of which starts tonight at 6pm with music by Big Red and the Cowboy Killers. Flyer here.

• Enter the Edgar-den: Tomorrow (10/11), The Poe Museum is hosting a fall festival in its garden for families of kids under 18. Details, check ‘em out.

• How bazaar: Eric Schindler Gallery is hosting a fall vintage bazaar tomorrow from 10am-3pm. More info here.

• Feeling festive?: Communities In Schools Richmond is hosting its free Harvest Fest tomorrow 11am-2pm at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, rain or shine. Peep the flyer.

• Postponed Peoples: The city’s Indigenous Peoples Day celebration on Powhatan Hill has been canceled for Monday due to threatening weather. Reschedule in the works for November. More details.

• Don’t zone out: Facing criticism, the city’s Planning Commission passed an ordinance to expand its Zoning Advisory Council from 17 to 21 members, which should finally include somebody from the 7th District. The Richmonder has more.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to [email protected] for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to [email protected] with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

1  I just checked back this afternoon and it appears that a lot of the results have since been wiped, which I’m guessing is just a momentary glitch? Hmm.

2  The national cycling advocacy group PeopleForBikes rates Richmond pretty low among its analysis of 2901 cities across the country, putting us in the 50th percentile. Within Virginia, we were the 37th-best place to bike statewide in the most recent batch of data. Though as longtime Richmond cyclist and advocate Doug Allen noted to the Mercury earlier this year, those rankings are best taken with a grain of salt. “I think the takeaway is that, yes, this may not be the most perfect rating system, but I think it does highlight the places where we still need to make some improvements,” he said.

3  Hat tip to Jon Baliles at RVA 5×5 for flagging this (very cool) map!