Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith

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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.

Police Release Video of Wheelchair Collision

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 7, 2008 in Crime. 45 Comments

Courtesy of The Hook, here is the video of Gerry Mitchell being hit by an Albemarle County Police cruiser:

Presumably the delay in releasing this video was to work out royalty payments to the Black Eyed Peas.

Collision at Downtown Train Crossing

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 2, 2008 in Crime and Transportation. 15 Comments

Train and CarAn Amtrak train hit a car at the 2nd Street crossing this afternoon, Henry Graff reports for NBC 29. The car was dragged about 100 feet and, luckily, nobody was hurt. The driver says that the crossing arm hadn’t come down, while the train’s engineer says that it did. The driver has been charged with failure to obey a railroad crossing signal. Amtrak trains are generally going pretty slowly at that spot, because they’re so close to the station. (I used to live on South and 1st, with an apartment directly over the tracks.) There are several thousand such accidents each year.

I can’t help but feel a bit skeptical of Amtrak’s claim that the gate was down. Like many people, I read Walt Bogdanich’s 2004 “Death on the Tracks” series in the New York Times, for which he won a Pulitzer. Bogdanich revealed that rail crossing guards are routinely broken, engineers routinely lie and claim that they were working fine, and the railroads send out repairman to fix the problem faster than federal inspectors can arrive. There are hundreds of such fatal accidents every year, dozens of which aren’t ever reported to the National Response Center.

Photo kindly provided by “gman.”

Council Likely to Retain Bus Fare

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 30, 2007 in Politics, Taxes and Transportation. 36 Comments

After evaluating running the city bus service without charging fares, city council is likely to keep fares for the immediate future, Seth Rosen writes in the Progress. Financial reality means that council has to pick their priorities, and they’ve got an eye towards adding new routes and having buses come more often. Eliminating fares would eliminate $315k from CTS’ $5.25M annual budget, and likewise obligate them to provide $190k to JAUNT, who would be left unable to charge for rides in CTS’ service area. All of this is leading up to a hoped collaborative transit venture with Albemarle County, turning CTS into CATS.

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