Tablet computers are working out pretty well in city schools. #
With a study supporting the 35 MPH speed limit on parts of the 250 Bypass, City Council intends to keep it there, Megan Davis writes for the Waynesboro News Virginian. (No, I don’t understand, either. Let’s chalk that up to a production error.) The study found that while most people are going faster, it also found that the lack of sufficient space for acceleration and slowing down necessitates the seemingly unreasonably slow speed limit. The westbound stretch after McIntire, in particular, is what strikes a lot of people as unreasonably slow until it hits 45 MPH just before the firehouse. (Councilor Dave Norris is one of those people.) Council intends to pass an ordinance restating that speed limit. All of this came about after a half dozen people appealed tickets for speeding, who argued that the limit is unreasonably low and was set in 1967 without a necessary study to demonstrate cause for it to be set so low.
A couple of guys fended off a rabid black bear at Royal Orchard Farm on Tuesday, NBC-29 reports. (The Progress has a somewhat longer story.) The men were in a Gator—a small, open utility vehicle—when the bear attacked the vehicle, and then came after then. Armed with a shotgun loaded with birdshot, reasonably enough during spring turkey season, one of them shot the bear point-blank in the head. Said noggin was sent off to a state lab, where it was confirmed that the bear had rabies.
Royal Orchard is the farm of the Scott family (as in Scott Stadium), located just off 64 on the way up to Afton. When driving up the long, slow grade to Rockfish Gap, at one point a bridge goes over the interstate at a crazy angle. That’s Royal Orchard Drive, a road that exists solely to connect their farm to Route 250. The house is an honest-to-God castle. The Shenandoah National Park was built around the estate, because the family had the money and the political power to keep the federal government from seizing their land and from building Skyline Drive within their viewshed.
Charlottesville has put their mapping system online for everybody to use, Courtney Beale writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow. The Charlottesville GIS Viewer is functionally much like Albemarle County’s web-based GIS system, providing property data, assessments, transfer histories, photos, and relatively sophisticated map display options. It’s pretty straightforward to create a custom map of floodplains, historic districts, police districts, voting precincts, or any of a few dozen other data layers.
VDOT got seven bids for the Western Bypass, but they’re secret until one is selected in June. #
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