An 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.
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.
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.
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.
The woman who built a razor wire fence to stop Rivanna Trail hikers from crossing her property has settled her lawsuit with the Rivanna Trails Foundation and the city, the Daily Progress reports. Shirley Presley was angry with the RTF after they published a map showing that the city-encircling trail ran through her property. She put up razor wire to stop trespassers, a violation of city law, which led to her lawsuit to get the RTF and the city to make people stop. The terms of the settlement were not released.
In the Daily Progress, Tasha Kates surveys which area restaurants allow smoking, and fine things are pretty well split. Those restaurants that have banned smoking say that it doesn’t seem to present a problem, and those who continue to allow it don’t seem interested in doing otherwise. The article was prompted by various smoking bans proposed by the General Assembly, whose sixty day session began today.
Charlottesville High School principal Kenneth Leatherwood is leaving for a job with the school’s central office, the Daily Progress reports today. He’s been CHS principal since 2003, and served as vice principal for the decade before that. Now he’ll be in charge of the HR department. Folks who think that the school system is a little too top-heavy will surely see this as further evidence that Superintendent Rosa Atkins’ priorities are off. On the other hand, maybe the guy was just ready to move on, but Atkins convinced him to stay within the school system in a different capacity. Thanks to Jennifer for the tip.
One year after the city started providing video of Council, Planning Commission, and BAR meetings, they’ve expanded their offerings. They used to offer only Windows Media Player embedded video, which is the very worst way to do it. (But far, far better than nothing.) Now two more formats are offered: MP4 (Quicktime) video and MP3s of the audio. The MP4s can be put straight on an iPod, loaded into iMovie for editing, uploaded to YouTube and otherwise remixed and repurposed, and the MP3s are as portable and flexible as audio can be. This is the raw material that will help citizen media continue to evolve and improve in Charlottesville.
I’ve been puzzled at the accolades that the city has received for their technological offerings, because they so often choose the lesser of available solutions. But this? This is great.
One hundred and forty years after its founding, A&N is closing. The Richmond-based chain has 48 locations throughout the state, and is run by Mark Sternheimer, the great-something-grandson of founders Mark and Lena Rose Sternheimer. The place has a great history. They had 53 locations just a few years ago, with our downtown location being one of the five that were shut down recently. The company just can’t make enough money to stay in business. I’ve made an effort to shop there in the two years since I discovered it was local, but apparently not many other people did.
A lot of folks here like the occasional outlet to talk about politics on a larger scale. To that end, Valerie writes in regarding the race among Republicans to select somebody to challenger former governor Mark Warner for Sen. John Warner’s U.S. Senate seat:
The would-be-amusing-if-he-wasn’t-so-damn-successful right-wing nut–uhm delegate from Prince William, Bob Marshall, has decided to run for the Republican nomination for the US Senate, in opposition to former repub Gov. Jim Gilmore–because Gilmore apparently is not right-wing enough. The repubs won’t choose him, because he’d never win a state-wide election, but it will likely be amusing to watch, and maybe distract him from his agenda in the Commonwealth? Just what we need–Bob Marshall not just peering into the bedroom windows of Virginia citizens, but those of the entire nation!
Marshall has what I’d describe as an obsession with sex, and has sought for years to outlaw sex for any purpose other than makin’ babies. It’ll be interesting to see what he decides to make the centerpiece of his campaign.
We’ve got about four inches out there, and somewhere between another 0″ and 4″ is supposed to fall. If it turns into freezing rain or sleet, the rest may just be a very unpleasant 1/4″ of ice. The kids have been sent home from school, and the dogs — or at least my dogs — are frolicking in the snow. It’s our first decent snow, three weeks into winter. Enjoy it while it’s pleasant.
Assembling data for the Uniform Crime Reports, the city has found that there was a 12% drop in crime rates between 2006 and 2007, Rob Seal writes in the Daily Progress. There was an 18% drop in violent crime, an 11% drop in property crimes, a 30% drop in aggravated assaults, and a 15% drop in burglaries. It remains to be seen whether this correlates with a nationwide drop or whether this is the result of the city’s own efforts. For comparison, Albemarle had a 2.3% crime decrease, and crimes against individuals actually increased.
In this week’s C-Ville Weekly, Will Goldsmith surveys Charlottesville’s not-yet-historic buildings from around town. It’s prompted by the city’s plan to track down individual historic properties around town and designate them as such. The list includes Kmart, Fry’s Spring Service Station, the old JNB at Barracks Road and the old Coke bottling plant, along with a mess of others. Bonus: great pictures by local photoblogger Eric Kelley.
The Hook is apparently in the same mood as C-Ville Weekly right now, and finds themselves looking back at the city’s history in the current issue. Dave McNair features a series of then-and-now photos of West Main Street, using Duncan Brown’s 1979 shots of the street. I know a lot of cvillenewsers enjoy a good look back at the C’ville that was just as much as I do, so y’all will get a kick out of the photos of the Duck Inn, Expresso International, the Cotton Exchange, and a bunch of others.
Raelyn Balfour has been found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of her infant, Rob Seal writes in the Progress. The wrenching trial sought to determine whether Balfour, who forgot to leave her nine-month-old son at daycare and instead left her in the car, had committed a crime. The Iraq veteran worked at the Judge Advocate General School, which is where the incident took place.
I’m not sure that anybody wanted to see this woman in prison.
Homeowners all over Albemarle are getting a welcome notice in the mail today, informing them that their assessments won’t be undergoing their normal annual ginormous increase. Residential assessments are increasing by just a fraction of a percent, Jeremy Borden writes in the Daily Progress, with the Samuel Miller district faring the best, with an average 1.18% drop.
Not coincidentally, Borden and Barney Breen-Portno also write that the county’s budget is a bad situation, what with the crappy housing market that’s caused the level assessments. The county was planning on a 2.4% increase in housing starts. Now it’s looking more like 1.6%, and it looks like belt-tightening time. (Or we’ll be buying a new, smaller, sleeker belt.)
The population of the Charlottesville area grew by 11.4% since 2000, adding 20,000 residents, the Progress reports. The area included in this is Charlottesville, Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene and Nelson. Urban areas in the state have been growing the fastest, while rural areas have seen population declines. (The Progress inexplicably labels Danville and Petersburg as “rural,” despite Danville having a larger population and size than Charlottesville, and Petersburg having nearly the same size population and being twice the size of C’ville.)
This is a community news blog about Charlottesville, VA, USA, started in March of 2001. It's run by Waldo Jaquith. It has nothing to do with C-Ville Weekly, the newspaper. Feel free to submit a story.
An 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.
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