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On Park(ing) Day, Celebrating Art Is a Walk In the Park(ing Space)

Owen FitzGerald | September 25, 2019

Topics: Art 180, community, mini parks, park, parking, parking day, parks, recreation, Transit, transportation, Venture Richmond

If you noticed something different about your usual parking space last weekend, you weren’t alone.

Last Friday, your favorite parking spot in the city might have been occupied — not by another driver who found it quicker than you did, but by public art spaces created by Richmond-area design, architecture, and creative firms as well as artists.

Photo by Owen FitzGerald

Park(ing) Day began in San Francisco in 2005 and has evolved into a global event. It is an annual celebration of public space, in which designers and artists turn public parking spaces into temporary public parks, art installations, or other creative artistic spaces.

This year’s event was coordinated by community partner organization Venture Richmond. 20 pop-up parks were created downtown, around Carytown, the Fan, and Scott’s Addition, and on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. The organization jumped at the opportunity to head up this year’s celebration.

“For us, the opportunity to activate our downtown streets with mini-parks for the day while simultaneously raising awareness of, and promoting, the City of Richmond’s parklet program was something we just couldn’t pass up,” said Max Hepp-Buchanan, Venture Richmond’s director of riverfront and downtown placemaking.

Photo by Owen FitzGerald

For Venture Richmond, hosting this year’s event also created an opportunity to keep some of the contest-winning parklets around for the long haul.

“We look forward to working with the City of Richmond and some of our participants in the near future to install permanent parklets, adding more public space to our increasingly vibrant downtown streets,” Hepp-Buchanan said.

Park spaces opened to the public Friday morning at 9 a.m. and remained open until 4 p.m. that afternoon. The winners of the contest were announced at a happy hour at Bar Solita downtown’s arts district that evening. This year’s winners were: 

  • Most Transformative: Carl Patow & Leila Ehtseham with Mactavish Beach
  • Best Vibe: ART 180
  • Most Artistic: HKS Architects & DPR
  • Grand Prize: Walter Parks Architects & KBS, Inc.
Photo by Owen FitzGerald

ART 180 has been in Richmond for 21 years, working with underprivileged and underrepresented youth, giving them a safe space to express their creativity.  They offer a number of after-school programs for kids in the city’s public schools and community centers, as well as classes for incarcerated teens. 

ART 180’s Community Program Manager, Dr. Vaughn Garland, said his organization was approached about creating a park in front of their building in Jackson Ward. 

“We love the idea,” Garland said.  “So we built a creative space. This is a space for creatives to come in and express their own interest.” 

Top Photo by Owen FitzGerald

GRTC Connects: Route 12 – Church Hill to the East End

Wyatt Gordon | July 31, 2019

Topics: affordable housing, bus routes, buses, church hill, East end, GRTC, GRTC Connects, homeownership, housing, population shift, poverty, public transportation, richmond transportation, transportation, wyatt gordon

The fifth installment in a monthly series in which a hometown Richmonder who has spent over a decade abroad explores the many different neighborhoods accessible by GRTC bus lines, to discover the ways transit connects us all.

Church Hill:

Strolling down the tree-lined avenues of historic homes, manicured mini-lawns, and tastefully curated porches of Church Hill, one could be forgiven for thinking they were out on a jaunt in Georgetown or Old Town Alexandria. Alas, a glance down 29th street toward the James River provides a reminder that this is still Richmond; the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument towers here over Libby Hill Park, one of the neighborhood’s grandest green spaces.

Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument (Photo by Wyatt Gordon)

Upon this hill 282 years ago, William Byrd II — a notoriously cruel slaveowner — observed that this bend of the James reminded him of a view from his childhood, that of the Thames from Richmond Hill on the outskirts of London. The name of the neighborhood also derives from a nearby landmark: Saint John’s Episcopal Church. Within its four walls, Patrick Henry persuaded the First Virginia Convention to send its troops to fight the British with a cry of “Give me liberty or give me death!” If Church Hill is a neighborhood with a long memory, then its collective consciousness likely has whiplash from the rapid change that has swept across this part of the city over the past decade and a half.

This past March, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition released a study on gentrification and cultural displacement. In the report’s Richmond section, local urban planner Shekinah Mitchell documents the “racialized wave crashing onto the shores of neighborhoods” in the city’s East End like Church Hill.

In 2016, the number of black and white people in Richmond was roughly equal — clocking in at 47 and 46 percent, respectively, of the city’s population. This equalization marked a drastic shift from the demographics at the turn of the millennium, when blacks made up 57 percent of the River City and whites just 38 percent.

Image via The Valentine Archives

Beyond the identity crisis faced by similar cities once characterized by their large black populations, such as Washington, D.C. — dubbed “the Chocolate City” for this very reason — Richmond’s shrinking black communities are the canaries in the coal mine of widespread physical, economic, and cultural displacement. The southern chunk of Church Hill up to Broad Street has long featured mostly white residents; however, the area’s stock of charming, relatively affordable homes and increasingly expensive amenities like Alewife, WPA Bakery, and Dutch & Co. have drawn in ever-greater numbers of homebuyers with purchasing power beyond that of longtime residents.

Image via The Valentine Archives

Such rapid gentrification means the majority of homebuyers in black neighborhoods today are white people. The New York Times recently created an interactive map to document this phenomenon down to the census tract level. In the area increasingly marketed as Church Hill North, whites made up just one in four residents in 2012; yet over the period from 2000-2017, comprised 61 percent of those who received home loans. In Chimborazo and Oakwood, the numbers are more alarming still: blacks made up 83 percent of residents, but whites received 68 percent of mortgages. 

New neighbors and amenities is a decidedly positive development for Church Hill. Gentrification need not be a dirty word: the problem with incoming residents is that all too often, the hunt for a place to live is a zero-sum game, resulting in a wave of displacement rather than a tide that lifts all boats. Historic district regulations and zoning laws frequently block the creation of more affordable multi-family housing, like the three-to-four story apartment buildings that make the Museum District so charming.

In this willfully sleepy neighborhood where bars close early and the sidewalks are still historic brick, it can be easy to squint and envision Richmond as it was centuries ago. The boxy, modernist homes springing up in every vacant lot are a preview of the city’s certain future. Whether neighborhoods like Church Hill — and Richmond at large — will grow denser or less diverse remains an open question.

The Ride:

After gorging myself on both savory and sweet pies from Proper Pie Co., I stood at the corner of 25th and Broad waiting on GRTC’s Route 12 bus. A woman randomly walked up to me and asked if I needed a daily pass for the bus. She had accidentally bought multiple, not realizing that she could not activate the passes another day, but rather they were only good for the day of purchase. Thanks to the kindness of this stranger named Carrie, the ride was off to a good start.

Photo by Wyatt Gordon

Lacking active GPS data, the Transit app and GRTC’s app both showed the same arrival time. Yet no bus came. Instead of waiting thirty minutes for the next bus to possibly not show, my friend Amber and I decided to walk the ten blocks to the new Market at 25th. After exploring this corner of the East End, we walked to the stop at 22nd and Fairmount Avenue to see what the experience of a shopper headed back to public housing’s Mosby, Whitcomb, Fairfield, and Creighton Courts would be like.

Transit app had live tracking for two westbound buses. Buses on Route 12 are supposed to come every thirty minutes, but due to bunching, this day a westbound passenger would have to wait either 12 or 48 minutes between buses. There was no live data for eastbound buses at all. The first bus we wanted to take never appeared. As we waited thirty minutes for the next scheduled eastbound 12 bus, two westbound buses drove past. 

After a half an hour sitting on the curb (this stop has no bench, shelter, or even a sidewalk), the next scheduled bus also failed to arrive. Frustrated, I tweeted at GRTC asking if something was wrong with the eastbound route.  Their prompt response informed me that only two buses were running that day, and they had no information of any disturbances along the route.

During this final half hour waiting on the next scheduled bus, I witnessed both buses disappear from the Transit app’s tracking at Route 12’s westbound terminus and reappear in Shockoe Bottom, again heading westbound.  After both buses passed our stop heading west a second time, Amber and I became too exasperated by the lack of a bus or answers, and gave up on the 12 — we took the Route 7 bus back to Church Hill. 

For someone riding the bus simply to write an article, the failure of four buses to show presents an inexplicable inconvenience. For someone trying to get home after shopping with their family, this would be a disaster. Imagine sitting on the curb for hours with two kids in 98 degree heat, as all your refrigerated goods perished, and your bus home failed to come again and again.

The East End:

Wine tastings of bubbly rosés, fresh caught scallops, and shelves overflowing with rapini, Hokkaido pumpkins, and bok choy could not have been found in the East End just a year ago. For shoppers at the newly opened Market at 25th, such luxuries are becoming commonplace.

PHOTO: The Market at 25th

As we wandered through aisles named after East End churches, teeming with tons of products sourced from the greater Richmond region, the Market’s desire to make itself approachable to existing residents was almost palpable. The dozens of families packing their carts full on a Friday afternoon seemed to indicate all is going according to plan: for the first time in years, East End residents have access to healthy, affordable groceries at a full-service supermarket. Our conversational cashier concurred; after some initial growing pains and price adjustments, business has been booming.

A block down the road lies Bon Secours’ Sarah Garland Jones Center — another relatively recent neighborhood addition, which painstakingly pays homage to the first black woman who passed the Virginia Medical Board’s exam to become a doctor. Through a partnership with the Robins Foundation, the center is home to the Front Porch Cafe, a coffee house that equips East End youth with life skills and work experience while providing the community an inviting local place to gather.

Go a few blocks in any direction from these top-notch amenities and their placement in the East End begins to feel like an anomaly. Most other streets in this area feature at least one staple of what sociologists refer to as “urban decay”: abandoned homes, boarded-up storefronts, general blight. The poverty and neglect found here can feel so tragic and unavoidable to the untrained observer, but the East End was designed to fail.

It is no coincidence that four of Richmond’s six large public housing communities all lie within one mile of each other in the East End. Altogether, over 9,100 people call Richmond Redevelopment & Housing Authority’s Mosby, Fairfield, Whitcomb, and Creighton Courts home. Over half of the residents are children seventeen and younger; the rest are mothers, grandmothers, and mostly female guardians living below the poverty line.

Photo via The Valentine Archives

South of Baltimore, RRHA’s four East End properties comprise the largest cluster of public housing in the country, and thus one of the densest concentrations of poverty in the whole nation, according to the agency’s outgoing head. What began as a New Deal-era ideal to replace slums with quality workforce housing rapidly transformed into a racialized weapon, to warehouse society’s least desirable people — blue collar blacks — in blocks of homes far away from wealthier whites. The six public housing complexes built for black people were never meant to replace the 4,700 housing units the city gutted from historically-black neighborhoods like Jackson Ward and Fulton, not to mention all the homes lost in predominantly black communities to the construction of I-95 and the Downtown Expressway.

In his book, Richmond’s Unhealed History, Rev. Ben Campbell writes, “You cannot separate the history of public housing in Richmond from race. It is the white establishment deciding what they want to do with predominantly black neighborhoods and using language that suggests they are trying to help improve them, while the actual fact is much darker than that. And that set the stage for what we are dealing with now.”

Today, that staggering concentration of poverty means 60 percent of Richmond’s public housing units fall within just one district, and thus have only one advocate for their needs on both a city council and a school board of nine. This intentionally diminished power of low-income voices manifests itself in the way we talk about, maintain, and plan the future of public housing today.

The courts’ maintenance issues and widespread lack of heat in past winters — many units didn’t have a functioning boiler last year — have led new RRHA CEO Damon Duncan to declare that Richmond’s current public housing properties have “exceeded their useful life by a good 15 years.” While current RRHA residents would likely jump at the chance to move into higher-quality housing, Duncan’s plans to demolish Richmond’s courts without guaranteeing current residents affordable units in new constructions has left many in the community worried displacement may soon be on their doorstep.

The boundary between Church Hill and the East End is as vague as it is porous. Although home values in the former may be triple or quadruple those of the latter, both neighborhoods face a similar challenge: how can we as a city welcome new residents without displacing those whose families have lived there for generations? If policymakers can’t solve this problem soon, then in a generation, there may not be much of a difference between Church Hill and the East End anyway.

RVA Bike Share Needs More Than a Tune-Up

Wyatt Gordon | August 27, 2018

Topics: bike share, bike sharing, rva bike share, transportation

Bike shares have never been more popular in America. But even as national programs see record numbers of riders, Richmond’s RVA Bike Share seems completely stalled, and a major expansion is on an indefinite hold.

Bike sharing first rolled onto Richmond’s streets to dazzle visitors during the 2015 UCI Road World Championships as part of a larger promise from the city of a more bike-friendly capital. The handful of stations that comprised the pilot project were meant to expand into a formal bikesharing system the following year. Despite a delay, RVA Bike Share eventually launched to much fanfare one year ago in August, 2017. The first phase of RVA Bike Share included 20 stations and 220 bikes scattered across the city while the anticipated $1.9 million second phase would double the number of stations and bikes to 40 and 440, respectively. Despite an announced spring expansion, the city agency responsible for the second phase, the Department of Public Works, has released no plans and last month admitted they have “no timeline for completing the project.”

After a year of operations RVA Bike Share’s own website boasts only 378 active members in a city of over 220,000. Just 5,262 people out of Metro Richmond’s 1.2 million residents and over 7 million annual visitors have ever tried out one of their bikes. This highly anticipated transit system was supposed to revolutionize cycling in the city by offering locals and visitors alike a cheap, easy, and healthy way to get around that would create a virtuous cycle of ever more riders and ever safer streets for all. This exciting vision of a healthier, greener, and more mobile Richmond remains, however, a distant vision.

City government and RVA Bike Share’s Canadian parent company, Bewegen, deserve kudos for getting creative and offering a Groupon for membership, providing a month of free rides to patrons of local businesses affected by Pulse construction, and promoting bikeshare tours exploring Richmond’s brunch scene, black culture, and murals. There are, however, three critical and far more substantial areas in which RVA Bike Share needs a full makeover if is to survive, let alone thrive: Accessibility, Affordability, and Agreements.

Graph courtesy Brian Seel

Accessibility
A successful bikeshare system requires two types of accessibility: a dense network of stations that cater to all as well as leadership that engages with and listens to the needs of its users—city residents. So far, Richmond has neither.

Shortly after the system launched, Powhatan-born transit journalist Canaan Merchant pointed out that RVA Bike Share stations are “concentrated downtown and in the West End which makes sense because it’s where some of the city’s densest and most bike friendly neighborhoods are, but this first phase ignores the city’s poorer neighborhoods in the East End and Southside.”  The current bikeshare network includes just one station east of I-95 and three stations barely south of the Downtown Expressway. All other stations restrict themselves to Downtown, the Fan, or Broad Street.

Such a dense network along a commercial corridor proves useful for people running errands during their lunch break; however, to boost ridership, bikeshare requires stations located in neighborhoods where people live. RVA Bike Share understandably limited its stations to the flattest portions of the city in its first phase, but once the second phase of motorized e-bikes commences there will be no excuse not to better connect those neighborhoods on the other side of a hill or river. The second phase must prioritize underserved residential areas of the city and dole out the twenty new stations to Northside, Manchester, and Church Hill to create a truly useful city-wide network.

With accessible leadership at RVA Bike Share, a more equitable and effective rollout of the second phase that would meet the needs of all Richmonders should be guaranteed; however, as yet the Department of Public Works has proved more elusive than engaged. After the announcement of an indefinite delay, the Department of Public Works denied multiple requests from the Times-Dispatch to interview the bike share coordinator, Jake Helmboldt. RVA Magazine’s own request for comment was simply ignored. Leadership that listens and takes heed of the public—bike share users—would actively solicit feedback. Instead, it seems the only work being done to find out where Richmond residents would like to see the twenty new stations is an independent survey from Sportsbackers’ Bike Walk RVA. The expansion and new station placement shouldn’t be a game of trial and error. Targeted community engagement from the top could make sure Richmonders are heard and the new stations are located to best serve their needs.

Affordability
The purchase of an annual pass—the most affordable option for Richmond residents looking to incorporate bikesharing into their commute—currently costs $96. In an era of subscriptions that users can cancel at any time, RVA Bike Share needs to offer an attractive price to earn such a commitment. For low-income and unbanked Richmonders, on the other hand, a $96 credit card charge is not a carefully weighed purchase but rather an impossibility.

Roughly $100 for a year of use may not sound unreasonable; however, other bike shares across the country offer lower rates for networks with ten times more bikes than RVA Bike Share currently provides. Furthermore, people in D.C., Boston, and San Francisco earn substantially more than the average Richmonder, making a $96 a year pricetag an even bigger ask relative to the $85 an Alexandrian would pay to commute with Capital Bikeshare. The fact that only 378 people in our city believe RVA Bike Share is a good enough value to become an active member should be cause enough for a rethinking of the current price point.

As is too often the case in modern policy making, those from the lower rungs of the income bracket have seemingly been forgotten. RVA Bike Share has no pricing targeting low-income Richmonders and has not mentioned any plans to do so. Portland State University released a comprehensive study last year which showed “low-income people of color were more likely than other groups to say that the cost of a membership was prohibitive to their use of a system.”  Especially in the former capital of the Confederacy our government should be modeling inclusive public policy that actively seeks to promote equity. There exist many role model bikesharing systems such as B-Cycle in Denver or D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare, both of which cater to low-income and non-banked clientele with $5 annual passes.

Boosting affordability boosts overall ridership. RVA Bike Share needs to offer Richmonders a good value and options for the low-income and non-banked among us if they want their number of active users to break 400.

Host City: System: Annual Pass: Median Income:
Minneapolis Nice Ride $75 $73,231
Washington, D.C. Capital Bikeshare $85 $95,843
Boston Hubway $85 $82,380
San Francisco Bay Area Bike Share $88 $96,777
Denver B-Cycle $95 $71,926
Richmond RVA Bike Share $96 $62,929
Chicago Divvy $99 $66,020

 

Agreements
The best bike shares amplify their impact on a city through agreements with large partners such as corporations, universities, and public transit agencies. So far, RVA Bike Share has only convinced one company (CarMax) to sponsor one station. Besides a letter from Mayor Stoney asking for support, it’s unclear what—if anything—the city is doing to ensure bike sharing’s success through institutional agreements. Sadly, Richmond’s bike share currently operates as a lone wolf in an industry that requires robust partnerships to thrive.

That same PSU study found that “when asked about what incentives would make residents more likely to use bikeshare, the most popular response was free transfers between bikeshare and public transportation.”  Imagine a world in which GRTC and RVA Bike Share link their two systems so Richmonders could hop off the Pulse and ride a bike the last mile home for free. What if RVA Bike Share negotiated a deal with VCU similar to GRTC’s and offered free bikeshare access to its students, faculty, and staff?  At the least the city could strike a deal to offer its own employees a reduced rate for the annual pass to decrease downtown congestion and promote the health of its workers.

If RVA Bike Share continues to ignore its lack of accessibility, affordability, and partnerships, its stint as part of Richmond’s multimodal ecosystem may be short lived. Bird’s launch of its scooter sharing in the city may be controversial and the focus of a dispute with city officials, however, in Baltimore the company “agreed to give discounts to low-income users and ensure that at least a quarter of their fleets serves mixed-income neighborhoods.”

That’s more than RVA Bike Share has done.

GRTC Pulse: Bus Riders Sound Off on New Lines Ahead of Rollout

Sarafina Sackey | June 14, 2018

Topics: GRTC, GRTC Pulse, rapid bus transit, transportation

The surprisingly contentious GRTC Pulse bus line is finally opening, and while it still has critics, it’s also building support among the people who actually ride it.

You can’t miss the new Pulse stations all over Broad Street, and they’ve inspired some controversy in the surrounding communities. Until this assignment, I too was critical, but had never ridden the bus. I didn’t realize how many people depended on it, or how it shaped the way they spent their days. On my first-ever ride, I noticed how the frequent stops pushed what could have been a 9-12 minute trip into almost 25 minutes.

For riders, this is a big part of the appeal of the Pulse. Fewer stops make for faster service, and it seems to answer many of the complaints bus riders had. Still, at least one rider wasn’t looking forward to changes. On my ride, coordinated with GRTC, a man in his mid-60s saw the logo-emblazoned bag they’d given me, full of brochures, and gave me a strange look. When our eyes clicked again for the second time, he began to vent his frustrations with the bus service, detailing years of complaints.

He said he’s been riding the bus since the 70s and claimed nothing had changed in that time. He was angry about the lack of bathrooms, which said was not fair, especially for elderly riders. He was also angry about long wait times at bus stops, and thought the Pulse would be a waste of time and money because he thinks nothing is going to change.

Others were more optimistic, including Lena Waite, who I also met on the bus. She said, “I think the new bus system would be good, especially if we have more buses and could get to places on time.” She’s had bad experiences with the current system, she said, detailing a recent incident. “I was on a bus home from work when it broke down on a hill. I had to get off and walk because I didn’t feel safe, plus it was getting dark and I couldn’t wait for another bus.”

Lena Waite

The Pulse will free up existing buses for other routes, according to Carrie Rose Pace, Director of Communications for the GRTC, which will address Waite’s problems with her existing commute. For riders on the new 7.6-mile line, linking Rocketts Landing to Willow Lawn, they won’t have bathrooms, but they’ll receive lower wait-times on a faster, high-capacity system designed to get them where they’re going quicker.

“BRT service stops less often, operates faster, uses design and technology features like Bus Only lanes and Transit Signal Priority,” Pace said, describing the upgrades. “It has off-board fare collection (at Ticket Vending Machines), and has platform-level boarding and alighting. All of this saves time, making the customer’s experience faster and easier.”

She said she’s a bus rider, too, who sometimes uses the current system to go to and from her home in downtown Richmond. The changes will benefit her and her neighbors, she said, by letting them use the bus over private automobiles or driving services like Lyft.

“Once the Pulse and the new City routes launch, I’ll be able to get from my home with a bus coming every 15 minutes,” she said. From the normal bus, she can, “quickly connect to a Pulse bus coming every 15 minutes, and get either east or west to my destination much faster than I’m used to. I will be able to ride beyond just downtown on the Pulse and quickly get to my appointments at Willow Lawn, or take a ride to enjoy the East Riverfront area.”

GRTC estimates that some 3,500 people will ride the Pulse daily, which could also benefit people driving cars, too: Every person on the bus is one less car on the road, easing congestion and freeing up parking spots at destinations.

“Each individual Pulse bus seats about 36 passengers,” Pace said. “But with fully-loaded standing room, we can safely accommodate 55 passengers.” That includes space for two individuals using mobility devices like wheelchairs, and bike storage on the front of each bus for up to three bicycles.

While most bus users will see a slightly different and faster route on launch day, different routes will operate differently. GRTC has updated their website with a detailed system map to help riders plan their trips ahead of launch.

Pace was positive about the long-term changes. She said, “Ultimately, the Pulse, coupled with the city redesign will lead to a shorter trip experience for most customers from point A to point B, with easier connections.” Even outside of the city, service will be improved. She added, “Henrico County is also making adjustments to several of their routes that connect to the Pulse, also ensuring a convenient connection.”

She listed, as an example, “connecting Route 19 with Willow Lawn,” which lets Henrico run buses “every 30 minutes all day.”

In our hyper-connected modern era, there were other benefits to public transit that I saw on my bus ride. It’s time to read a newspaper or stare at your phone; catch up on work; listen to music; or simply ponder the issue of the day, without having to watch the road. All of which will be even easier on the Pulse, which is launching with free Wi-Fi. 

Ultimately, Pace stressed that the goal was to consider the safety and efficient use of the corridor for all people, regardless of their mode of transportation. The new signals, lanes, crosswalks, and overall design were all reached through a process that prioritized safety for all.

If, like me, you’re curious about the Pulse, you’ll be able to hop on for free for the first week, June 24 to 30. After June 30, tickets are $1.50, with a reduced fare of $0.75. The system accepts the unlimited ride passes used on the rest of the GRTC network, and paratransit customers have unlimited free access. Operation is 5:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. on weekdays, 6 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. on weekends. During peak hours, 7 to 9 a.m. and 4 to 6 p.m., buses run every 10 minutes. Off-peak, every 15 minutes.

From food crawls to adventure rides, RVA Bike Month offers events for beginners & seasoned cyclists

Charlotte Woods | May 8, 2017

Topics: bike lanes, Bon Secours, community, RVA Bike Month, RVA Bikes, Sports Backers, transportation

The weather is warming, the plants are blooming, and many of us may already feel the pull to be outside more. Why not hop on our bicycles and save money on gas while we’re at it? Bon Secours and Sportsbackers kicked off their Fourth Annual RVA Bike Month last week and for the entire month of May, bicycle-themed events and celebrations will take place throughout the city.

“It has been great to watch an exciting month of events grow to be something with which other organizations choose to partner,” said Brantley Tyndall, community engagement manager at Sportsbackers. “I’m so pleased that the healthy community aspect of riding bikes is something Bon Secours wants to highlight as a new sponsor of the program.”

From food-geared events such as a taco tour and pizza crawl to bike parties and charity events, RVA Bike Month will offer a little something for everyone.

Some events will feature safety discussions to ensure that Richmond’s cyclists are prepared to take on this eco-friendly means of transportation safely. There will a “Crossing of the James” history ride, a “Bike to School Day”, treasure hunt, Outpost Richmond’s 200k Adventure Ride, Kids Introduction to BMX, a Strava Art Ride and much more.

Participants in Bike Month are also encouraged to take a Vision Zero pledge, part of a multinational road traffic safety concept to achieve zero traffic-related deaths and major injuries .

“The solutions are manifold, but education and citizen participation are among them, and Bike Walk RVA’s Vision Zero Pledge coincides with our RVA Bike Month program to educate drivers, bike riders, and people who walk (which is essentially everyone) that we must all do our part,” Tyndall said.

“That means following the law (regardless of how you’re getting around), putting your phone down, being visible and predictable, slowing down, abstaining from driving with alcohol or other substances in your system, and removing all forms of distraction when behind the wheel.”

The event is in its fourth year, but this year may be pivotal for bikers, as Richmond has made stronger cycles towards including more bike lanes and racks throughout the city.

“I think bikes make Richmond the best version of Richmond,” Tyndall said. “Anyone who has lived here long enough knows we aren’t trying to be another city, and I think that’s a great thing.Richmond is an amazing city for riding. It’s relatively flat (believe me, Seattle and Pittsburgh are way steeper!), grid-oriented, compact, and beautiful.”

Though he’s full of Richmond pride, Tyndall still sees other cities as inspiration for bicycle-oriented growth.

“The thing that Portland, Seattle, and the DC Metro Area have on us is decades of incremental build out of a thorough bikeway network,” Tyndall explained. “I’m confident that if we keep plugging away at it, Richmond could see one in four trips made by bike like in downtown Portland. That’s right, 26 percent!”

You can see the entire list of RVA Bike Month events and get more details on them here.

Tuesday night’s mayoral forum turns from debate on education and transportation, to targeting Mayor Jones

Amy David | June 10, 2016

Topics: city hall, education, Mayor Dwight C. Jones, mayoral candidates, Northside, Richmond city council, richmond city public schools, transportation

Eleven mayoral candidates met at Richmond Community High School Tuesday night to discuss their visions for the Northside and the city as a whole. The forum, organized by the Brookland Park Area Association, featured all the presumptive front-runners as well as lesser-known candidates trying to introduce themselves to voters.
[Read more…] about Tuesday night’s mayoral forum turns from debate on education and transportation, to targeting Mayor Jones

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