Category Archives: News

DPU Doing Work On Belvidere and Cumberland

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From email:

Starting Wednesday, April 3, contractors for the Department of Public Utilities will be making drainage repairs at the northwest quadrant of the intersection of Belvidere and Cumberland streets. Two lanes of Belvidere headed south will be closed for 2-3 days to install a manhole. One lane of Belvidere and one land of Cumberland will then be closed for approximately three weeks.

Parking will be limited in this area during April, which will impact VCU students. Repairs include replacement of two drop inlets, installation of a manhole, repair of an existing drop inlet, and curb and gutter construction. Estimated completion date is May 1.

Mariane Jorgenson
Marketing and Public Relations Specialist
Richmond Department of Public Utilities
730 E. Broad Street, 6th Floor
Richmond, VA 23219
(804) 646-5224, cell (804) 690-8589
www.richmondgov.com/dpu
Blog www.cordpu.blogspot.com
Twitter: @UtilityBuddy
Facebook www.facebook.com/rvadpu

Richmond Riverfront Corporation Proposes Elevated Bike Tubes As Part of 2015 Race Preparations

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It’s already been quite a morning for riverfront development plans, and yet there is more…

Overlooking the Haxall Canal, a representative from the Richmond Riverfront Development Corporation made this announcement:

“Some of our corporate members are concerned about the daily dangers for our commuter drivers and workers presented by bicyclists who insist on riding in the same riverfront area streets as motorized vehicles, therefore, we are proposing to building separate but equal, elevated bike lane tubes. In addition to increasing safety, this project will represent a major contribution to the 2015 UCI World Road Cycling Championship race that will be held in our fair city.”

Skycycle screen shot

The curiously unnamed representative declined to put a cost to this bike tube project, noting that this still needed to be worked out within the public/private partnership. While it was not stated, it seems likely that this project will be done in tandem with the James River Skyway project and Japanese-Italian conglomerate Fuki-Trani. Elevated bike lane tubes are all the rage in the urban design world since last year, when landscape architect Sam Martin proposed Skycycle, a separated, elevated system of bike lanes for London.

Locally, elevated tubes were mentioned several times at the recent Envision This Challenge for Shockoe Bottom, a contest that sought to gin up plans to connect the Bottom and the Slip.

Members of the Richmond bicycling community seemed more surprised than anyone else. City Bicycle, Pedestrian, and Trails Coordinator Jakob C. Helmboldt and New Sportsbackers Bike Advocate Max Hepp-Buchanan have not stated anything in relation to this announcement yet. Though longtime City watchers have also been whispering about future Richmond ‘tube projects’ for a while now, including a new, improved Church Hill tunnel and ‘high speed vacuum’.

Byrd House Market Buys Fine Foods

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While its not on their blog yet, Byrd House Market manager Anna Edwards has confirmed that the Byrd House Market farmer’s market, using a mixture of funding from the William Byrd Foundation, federal grants, crowdsourcing, and their own produce proceeds, has purchased the Fine Foods convenience store on Idlewood.

“We wanted to create a ‘game-changer’ for Richmond farmers markets in order to further our mission of providing living laboratories for learning nutrition, ecology and economics.” said Edwards. She alluded to a not-yet-announced partnership with another grocery enterprise to help run the new store/market.

Though a lot of details have not been settled, some things are becoming clear- the farmer’s market with outside vendors will eventually move from their current location near the Grace Arents Community Garden to one side of the Fine Foods building and possibly be open everyday to sell fresh produce. (This is where the Fancy Flea market was held previously.) The Fine Foods building itself will go through a major overhaul. There’s discussion of adding a whole floor to the building and doing significant landscaping changes to the asphalt parking lot area. Solar panels and/or green roof are part of that. A portion of the building will be reserved for gardening and community workshops. The grocery shelves will gradually become more oriented to natural/healthy/gourmet.

Perhaps of more interest to current Fine Foods patrons, the new business will, at least in the beginning, retain the employees of Fine Foods to sell selections from their expanded beer fridge as well as lottery tickets.

Breaking News: James River Skyway Announced

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This morning an Italian-Japanese conglomerate, Fuki-Trani Ltd., announced plans for an exciting new riverfront project, a high-speed cable car crossing the James River. The preliminary design would have one side of the crossing originating at a station on a portion of Oregon Hill near the Overlook townhouse complex, with heavy duty cable going over the James River and the Belle Island park to the other terminal station on top of the Riverside Apartments building on Riverside Drive on the south side.

Example of gondola lift/skyway at Sulphur Mountain in Alberta, Canada:

Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones and Councilperson Parker Agelasto were beaming as they briefed a few media members on the outline of the deal in the first floor of City Hall late last night. “This represents a fantastic opportunity to leverage Richmond’s natural assets and create jobs,” said Mayor Jones. “What a beautiful way to connect the opposite sides of the James River, the City, and the 5th District,” added Councilperson Agelasto.

The amount of investment by the Fuki-Trani group is estimated at between 8 and 10 million dollars, and the City of Richmond is putting in $2 million into the project initially. Dominion Resources had to approve of the project in advance because it will use airspace above their riverfront headquarters facility. The Oregon Hill station will require zoning changes as it adaptively re-uses the land where Overlook construction ceased and there are a few town home foundations. (Residents may recall at one point a developer from Cleveland was considering them a few years ago). According to preliminary plans, the station would operate from 6 am to 11 pm and employ 2 to 3 people with a small walk-up snack bar. Rides would cost between $5 to $8, though a commuter/student discount may be possible. Some nearby residents along the Oregon Hill Parkway have already expressed concern for noise from the station.

Fuki-Trani spokespeople offered few other details at this time, though they did say that they were already looking at possible future skyways in other parts of Richmond. Here is some additional information on gondola/cable car lifts, courtesy of Wikipedia:

While gondola lifts are traditionally used for ski resort purposes, in recent years they are finding increased usage in urban environments as seen in the installations of the Metrocable (Medellín), Portland Aerial Tram, Metrocable (Caracas) and Cable Aéreo (Manizales). The Metrocable systems in Medellin and Caracas are fully integrated with the public transit network which provides passengers the ability to seamlessly transfer to the local metro lines. London, UK, has built Emirates Air Line (cable car) for the 2012 Summer Olympics.
In terms of urban gondola systems for the future, TransLink in Metro Vancouver has proposed to build a gondola up Burnaby Mountain to Simon Fraser University in an announcement in September, 2010.
In late 2012, a widespread aerial gondola system was proposed for Austin, Texas in an effort to expand mass transit options in the rapidly growing city.

New Twist On Urban Chicken Debate

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Later today there will be an unveiling for Oregon Hill’s “Virtual Chicken House”. A neighborhood resident and artist, who does not want his address or name published, has created a project that he says was inspired by the local debate over urban chicken-keeping. “I was working on it before the recent flurry of messages over the neighborhood Yahoo list,” he said, “but with proposed legislation before City Council, now maybe the perfect time to take it public.”

It consists of a wooden backyard structure that is a little bit bigger than a standard chicken coop, but fully networked for an array of a half a dozen reconfigured Roomba vacuum robots, that simulate chickens. Using timers, cameras, microphones, and speakers, the ‘chickens’ periodically go in and out of the ‘house’, making slight clucking and pecking noises. The website with Roomba-chicken camera feeds is not yet online.

Photo Credit “Moving in for the Kill” Eirik Newth @ Flickr. Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

“I thought about naming each Roomba after City Council members and various City officials and adding their photos to the tops of the Roombas, but I thought that might cause bad feelings so I decided not do that,” said the artist. Instead, he will be offering patrons the chance to adopt and name the individual Roombas. He noted that are other chicken Roomba automation schemes out there, as well as other forms of Roomba art.

Note: Roomba is a trademark of the iRobot company.

Article On Condemned Pine Street House

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From article in this morning’s Times Dispatch:

While a single dilapidated property can drag down values in a neighborhood, in many cases it wouldn’t be quite as literal as what’s happening to W. Thomas Wiles’ two-story row house at 418½ S. Pine St. in Richmond’s Oregon Hill community.
The condemned end unit next door, which shares a wall, roof and porch with Wiles’ property, has been vacant since late 2004, crumbling into ruin and pulling his house along with it, said Wiles, who keeps a binder full of code violations that the neighboring owner, believed to live in Maryland, has racked up with the city.
Despite eight years of phone calls and emails, he has been unable to get the city to do anything about the house besides tabulating code violations and tacking up bright-orange condemnation notices that have made it tough for Wiles to sell or rent his property.

There is also a related gallery of photos.