New RVA maps unlocked

Among the many editorial resources The Lookout’s one-man, zero-revenue newsroom lacks, a data-visualization team is a big one. Who doesn’t love an interactive infographic that presents complex data and reportage in a digestible format to help them grasp the world around them? I sure do. The bad news is I don’t have the budget to commission that sort of thing (or anything else, for that matter.)

The good news is that a group of independent, cartographically inclined whizzes right here in Richmond are already doing data-viz work that very much overlaps with The Lookout’s editorial mission to better understand the city’s East End. Using open-source mapping tech and a variety of data, MapsRVA is telling collaborative stories about street-level life in Richmond that words alone could never.

The project started in 2023, when the US chapter of OpenStreetMap, a popular open-source mapping software, held its annual conference in Richmond. Some time after the event, co-founders Jacob Hall and Daniel Schep connected through the OpenStreetMap community to form a mapping group here in the River City. “It’s kind of just sort of organically taken off from there,” explained Hall in a recent phone interview with The Lookout. “It began as just literally a couple of people… now we've had a decent amount of interest, which is awesome, and we’re putting together a more serious meeting schedules and getting a little bit more engagement, which is awesome.”

Though MapsRVA has been mapping Richmond for a couple years, I only encountered its work last month, when Hall, Schep, and co. published a series of maps charting the city’s water crisis. Using survey feedback from over 2,000 residents across the city—including many right here in Church Hill—the group was able to generate interactive visuals that showed the degree, duration, and breadth of the water loss on a block-by-block basis. (Hall credited Richmond’s very-active subreddit, r/rva, with helping MapsRVA gather enough responses to make the project work.) The resulting maps, produced on OpenStreetMap, are a treat to tool around on, offering a color-coded view of the water crisis we all experienced.

“To me, that visual is one of the most striking memories of that week,” said Hall. “Being able to tell that story, being a part of that process of creating the narrative, was incredible.”

As I wrapped my interview with Hall, we got to talking about The Lookout’s (very rudimentary) effort at mapping Flock Safety’s surveillance cameras and microphones that have sprouted up all over the neighborhood. “I actually read your article about it, come to think of it,” they replied. “That's one of the inspirations that we had… we can add that map data to OpenStreetMap.”

A few days after we spoke, MapsRVA had done exactly that, publishing an interactive map geolocating automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and gunshot detectors throughout the city. It’s sort of a local version of the DeFlock.me project, which also uses OpenStreetMap, and it’s both more comprehensive and easier to navigate than The Lookout’s Google Map-enabled efforts. “I do spatial modeling in my day job, which involves more statistics than mapping,” explained Mike O’Brien, who collaborated with the group’s other cofounder, Schep, on the effort. “It's been really helpful to have the MapRVA group as they have a much better eye for the art of mapping than I do.”

O’Brien, an East Henrico resident, has been informally monitoring ALPRs for longer than he’s been a MapsRVA member. Last spring, his wife filed a public-records request with the county for its contract with Flock after one of the firm’s cameras went up near their house. He’s been keeping an eye out for them ever since.

“I'm a marine biologist and a portion of what I do in my day job involves triangulating fish,” O’Brien told The Lookout in a recent email exchange. “After reading your original article on the gunshot detectors in Church Hill and seeing the map you had created, I realized that if humans were fish, I would be setting receivers up in exactly the same places in order to position them: a series of triangles in what looks like a sawtooth pattern.”

After some time cruising the East End, O’Brien’s hunch proved out: the “sawtooth” mic arrangement is obvious when you zoom in on the Church Hill portion of MapsRVA’s map. The map also tags four ALPRs in the area: a pair facing north and south on Mosby Street at its intersection with the Leigh Street Viaduct, and another pair facing east and west on Nine Mile Road. O’Brien considers ALPRs "a very questionable dragnet,” and I tend to agree. But even if you’re fine with warrantless, searchable, always-on surveillance cameras in our neighborhood, you may as well know where they are—after all, your tax dollars paid for them. Thanks to MapsRVA (and DeFlock.me, from which the Richmond mappers’ project draws some of its tags), now you do.

O’Brien encouraged anybody in Church Hill who wants to tag ALPRs on OpenStreetMap to follow DeFlock’s instructions; locations submitted with that method will populate on MapsRVA’s local version “within a few minutes.”

For their part, Hall has an ask of their own: map with MapsRVA. “We're really excited to work with anybody, even if they're not familiar with mapping or programming,” they said. “If anyone's interested in something—like mapping community fridges or something—we’re stoked, we want to help. We want to help give people the tools.”

📜 Possum Poetry

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to [email protected]. All submissions anonymous!

🚧 Did you spot the sneckdowns?

If there’s one thing the snowfall last month revealed to me, it’s that former mayor Levar Stoney’s Department of Public Utilities sure ignored a lot of warning signs about the deteriorating condition of the water plant over the past decade. But if there were two things it revealed, it’s that Church Hill’s streets are wide as hell, and should probably be redesigned to make them safer. How do I know? Didn’t you see the sneckdowns all over the neighborhood?

Sneckdowns are useful because they show very clearly how much public space has been paved over and ceded to drivers at the expense of the rest of us. And more importantly, they create a natural blueprint for how to reclaim it in a way that allows for more, and safer, non-car road usage. Cars don’t need all that extra asphalt to navigate the neighborhood; it could be bike lanes, sidewalks, pocket parks, etc. Church Hill was chock-full of sneckdowns after the snowstorms in mid-January; they were most obvious at the traffic circles. I stupidly didn’t grab a good photo of any of them before the snow melted, but you can still kinda see the remnants of them from the salt/sand/grit they left behind when they melted. If it snows again next week—and it might!—see if you can spot the sneckdowns that form.

👕 Yard No Sale a success

After publishing a column on it last Friday, your humble Lookout editor had to swing by the second-ever Yard No Sale buy-nothing event at Triangle Park last Saturday. Attendance was great, and the free goods and apparel were plentiful. Big thanks to all the Lookout readers who said hello! “Everything you need already exists and we will continue to hold no-sales to help you find” it, organizer Angie Martinez vowed on social media after the event, touting its “great turnout.” For more on future Yard No Sale events, keep an eye on its Instagram account.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Late date: The folks at Friend Bar are pulling another “graveyard shift” tonight—they’ll be pulling corks 9pm-12am in the Pizza Bones-adjacent space. Info here.

• Tree-planting postponed: The Church Hill Association had to punt yet again on its volunteer day at Libby Hill Park. It was supposed to be tomorrow, but has been canceled for inclement weather. Check their calendar.

• Vendors at the mender’s: Top Stitch is hosting Dransfield Jewelers and Honey Honed Sharpening from 11am-3pm this Saturday. Get the details.

• Yes we CAHN: The Vernon J. Harris Medical and Dental Center on N. 25th St. is absorbing more patients from three other Richmond clinic locations forced to close due to Trump’s anti-constitutional funding freeze. The Merc has more. 

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to [email protected] for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to [email protected] with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.