Monthly Archive for March, 2006

Page 7 of 9

Our Burgeoning City Traffic

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 9, 2006 in Ask cvillenews.com and Transportation. 18 Comments

East High Street. Long Street/250. West Main. Ridge/McIntire. From 4:00-5:30 each day, these roads are packed. High Street gets backed up clear past Meade, Long past Locust and sometimes to Park. Navigating Pantops during lunchtime and during evening rush hour is an exercise in patience. As the populations of the surrounding counties boom (Fluvanna, in particular), the number of people commuting to Charlottesville climbs correspondingly.

What are we going to do? It’s not possible to widen most of these roads — we’ve got to work with what we’ve got. The Meadowcreek Parkway and the 29 Bypass Bypass wouldn’t have any effect on this traffic. Public transit to and from population centers in Albemarle and the surrounding counties would be neat, but I don’t see it in the cards. The only solution that I see is a total overhaul of how planning works for the entirety of Central Virginia, creating viable centers of blue- and white-collar commerce all around the area, rather than centering on Charlottesville.

But that’s just one idea. What do you think will keep things from getting worse?

UVa Minimum Wage Going Up

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 9, 2006 in Business and UVa. 2 Comments

UVa will raise their minimum wage from $8.88 to $9.37/hour, Melanie Mayhew reported in yesterday’s Progress. The recently re-established living wage movement at UVa has led to activists demanding that the school raise their minimum wage to $10.72, which they calculate as the lowest viable wage for an area resident. There are 809 UVa employees who learn less than that amount. The existing wage rate was established in December.

5:40pm Update: There’s actually a newer article in today’s Progress that expands on yesterday’s internet-only article.

Would-Be Bomber Pleads Guilty

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 9, 2006 in Law and Justice. Closed

A plea bargain has been struck between prosecutors and the 16-year-old accused of planning to attack county high schools, Liesel Nowak reports in today’s Daily Progress. The boy is the oldest of the four accused of conspiracy. He’ll be sentenced April 5, for which he could spend nearly five years in prison. Court proceedings against the other three began yesterday and will continue on March 17, which may wrap things up.

WINA’s New Website

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 8, 2006 in Meta News. 6 Comments

WINA has a new website but, sadly, it represents a big step back for a station that was once a local on-line pioneer. The only obvious improvements are that it’s a little prettier and there’s a hint at future podcasting (though the restoration of streaming, which they once offered, would be good).

There are three big problems. First, all old links to their news are broken, rendering every link on the web to every WINA story useless, leading to an ugly 404. Second, there is no way to link to any story on the website now — there’s not a unique page for every story any more, not even an anchor. Third, not only have the old archives disappeared, but there is no archive of the news being added on the new site. The result is that their stories can’t be linked to, and they’ve essentially excused themselves from participating in the web. I guess I’ll have to wait for other media outlets to carry stories and write ’em up then, since I can’t link to WINA’s site.

Amazingly, there’s still no RSS feed, something that I can’t really fathom. Any news outlet without a subscription mechanism (RSS, RDF, Atom, whatever) is stuck in the mid-90s. I don’t know why they’d put a penny into altering their website without starting with a feed. So I’ve modified my screen-scraped RSS feed to work with their new code base.

Maybe they’ll go back to their old site. This one sucks. If you agree, you should vote in the poll on their sidebar and tell ’em it’s no good.

(Via Jim Duncan)

03/09 Update: WINA tells me that the site’s not done — it’s a work in progress. Keep your fingers crossed that all of these things will be fixed.

2007 Budget Proposed

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 8, 2006 in Politics and Taxes. Closed

City Manager Gary O’Connell has presented the 2007 budget for Charlottesville, which proposes $121M in spending, an 8.45% increase over the current year, John Yellig wrote in yesterday’s Daily Progress. Partially offsetting the 14% increase in real estate assessments, the budget cuts real estate taxes by two cents — a thirteen cent cut would be necessary to maintain the current taxation level.

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