Monthly Archive for January, 2008

Page 7 of 8

Planning Commission: No More Paving

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 9, 2008 in Development and Transportation. 10 Comments

A southern Albemarle road. By David Gellner. (CC)

The Albemarle Planning Commission has recommended that the county stop paving rural roads, Jeremy Borden writes in today’s Progress. The planning commission is trying to support the county policy of building in the urban ring, and just can’t see spending the money on paving back roads. The Board of Supervisors will be discussing their priorities over the next month, and one of the things they’ll have to consider is whether they want to move towards paving the county’s two hundred miles of dirt and gravel roads.

Borden interviews Allison Mitchell, who lives on Gilbert Station Road (just off 20N, in Stony Point), who complains that her road should be paved, and it’s just not safe. Thing is, Mitchell isn’t from Stony Point. So she moved to Gilbert Station knowing full well that it’s not paved, and she ought to know by now that most people who live on Gilbert Station don’t want it paved. I live on an unpaved road near Gilbert Station, and I’d actively oppose any efforts to pave my street. People move out to the country and then complain that they have no urban amenities. Suck it up or go away.

01/10 Update: Lonnie provided some enormously useful information on this topic on his blog last month.

C-Ville Reporters on Reporting

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 7, 2008 in Meta News. 4 Comments

The current — soon to be last week’s — C-Ville Weekly has a really great feature in which reporters write about their highlight of the past year. Cathy Harding defends C-Ville‘s atrocious “Rant” page, Tobias Beard writes about Barack Obama and inspiration, Jayson Whitehead explains how he ended up on Ken Boyd’s shit list, Erika Howsare rightly frets about greenwashing, Will Goldsmith shines a light on Albemarle’s tendency to cave in to even the tiniest amount of public input, Scott Weaver discovers that a goofy costume goes a long way before city council, Brendan Fitzgerald is totally excited about The Bridge, Doug Nordfors thinks VQR is teh awesome, and John Ruscher chronicles life as a music reviewer. It’s revealing, personal writing, allowing us to learn more about reporters than we’d normally get to.

Disclaimer: I work for VQR and I’m on the board of The Bridge. But I knew I was going to have to write about this article before I even flipped to the page that mentioned either of those.

Hook Music Calendar

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 7, 2008 in Music. 26 Comments

The Hook has a new local music section of their website that’s pretty nice — it’s got audio, video, show reviews, comments from the public, etc. The best part: an iCalendar-compliant music calendar, perfect for syndication and mashups. Any “community calendar” that doesn’t offer ICS syndication is basically useless. Yeah, that’s right — this blog entry was an excuse for me to kvech about how lousy every single local online community calendar is. I’ve been fishing for the opportunity for months.