Wednesday, you're looking good.

🌤️ Today's weather: Mostly sunny, with a high of 91 and a low of 72.

🎧 Sounds like: "Right Round" by Flo Rida.

🎂 Happy birthday to our members Scott Blackwell, Anant Singh, Steve Eldridge and Rob Damschen!

✍️ Programming note: Today's 1 big thing is part of our Under-the-Radar Richmonders series spotlighting locals making an impact behind the scenes.

• Nominate someone for a future feature here.

Today's newsletter is 1,080 words, a 4-minute read.

Claire Dee learned to recognize the sound from inside her Henrico home. A screech of tires. A bang.

• Her routine was to grab her phone, sometimes a blanket or water, and head toward the Twin Hickory Drive intersection to help.

Why it matters: Those crashes pushed Dee and neighbor Janna Kiseeva to document wrecks and collect about 350 signatures calling for safety improvements, spurring the county to install a permanent roundabout last year.

The big picture: It's part of a larger shift in how Henrico is trying to make roads safer.

• The county has installed 23 roundabouts since 2021, and now considers them its "primary design" for intersection improvement projects.

Catch up quick: Twin Hickory and Hickory Bend Drive — an intersection within a half-mile of a preschool, an elementary school, and Deep Run High — had become a source of anxiety for neighbors, especially during school pickup and dropoff.

• Kiseeva started digging into crash databases and launched a petition in early 2024, citing 13 incidents over the previous couple years, including six in 2023.
• She also asked neighbors to photograph crashes, noting the date, time and whether traffic looked particularly bad.

Zoom in: By March 2024, residents were meeting with county officials. By June, a temporary roundabout was in place.

• Public Works director Terrell Hughes tells Axios it "proved to be successful," and Henrico made the roundabout permanent in May 2025.
• Henrico didn't provide before-and-after crash figures.

Yes, but: Hughes says Henrico is generally seeing fewer serious and injury crashes at its roundabouts, though most are too new for a full evaluation.

• Darbytown and Turner roads, for example, haven't had an injury crash in nearly three years since a roundabout was installed, Hughes adds.

The bottom line: As for Dee, she can now make a left turn during the morning school rush.

• Before the roundabout, she says, "I'd have been taking my life in my hands."

Read about the roundabouts on the way

Richmond Region Tourism spends an average of $30,000 to $40,000 a year on social media influencers, the tourism agency tells Axios.

Why it matters: Influencers have become part of the hotel-tax-funded effort to draw visitors to the region — as social media increasingly shapes where people vacation.

By the numbers: 61% of travelers surveyed said they find trip ideas on social media, while 73% said influencer content has led to bookings, per industry research.

Zoom in: That's why Richmond Region Tourism has been working with content creators since 2022, RRT spokesperson Carla Murray tells Axios.

• RRT selects influencers that "align with the Richmond Region's brand" and covers creators' travel, hotel and meals, she says.
• In exchange, the influencers produce social media reels, stories, posts, blogs, photos or videos promoting the region.

By the numbers: A 15-90 second reel runs between $1,000 and $7,500 "for a small to mid-level influencer," Murray says.

The intrigue: Rather than paying individual influencers, RRT spent just over $200,000 to landed the world's largest trade conference of travel influencers in June.

• RRT, which is largely funded through local hotel taxes, estimates the content attendees produced here was worth more than $1.2 million.

Keep reading for how much other tourism boards spend

👀 SCC Chair Kelsey Bagot says she won't recuse herself from reviewing NextEra Energy's proposed $67 billion acquisition of Dominion Energy, despite questions about her previous work as a NextEra attorney. (Times-Dispatch)

🎓 The DOJ is investigating whether William & Mary violated federal civil rights law by using race in awarding scholarships, including a law school program that gives mentorship opportunities to HBCU grads. (VPM)

• W&M says it doesn't comment on pending legal matters.

🥳 Richmond's Open High School and Community High School once again ranked No. 62 and No. 164, respectively, in U.S. News & World Report's latest best high school rankings. (Times-Dispatch)

❤️ Hopewell volunteers collected and sent off 100 cases of donated supplies to Colombia, where a 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit last week. (WWBT)

🥙 Cava, the Mediterranean-style fast-casual chain, is coming to the former TGI Fridays spot on Laburnum in eastern Henrico this fall. (BizSense)

Richmond is getting ripped.

The big picture: We’re the 20th-fittest city in America, per the 2026 American Fitness Index from the American College of Sports Medicine and the Elevance Health Foundation — up 20 spots from last year.

Fun fact: That’s the biggest jump of any city in the rankings, putting us ahead of New York (No. 26), Los Angeles (55) and Miami (39), which is so known for its fitness obsession that it has a Muscle Beach.

Yes, but: While we beat Virginia Beach (61) and Chesapeake (89), we have a ways to go to push Arlington from the top spot.

More on the rankings

👋 Karri here, in search of your help finding the best pizza in Richmond.

Why it matters: We're launching our first-ever pizza bracket next week and want to make sure we didn't miss any gems.

Driving the pie news: The Axios Richmond pizza bracket will launch Monday, pitting the best of the best local pizza joints against each other in a weeklong contest.

• But first, we need to decide the list of 16 places we'll feature.

How it works: Submit your pick here by 3pm tomorrow to tell us which pizza restaurants we must include — and why.

• We'll be the final judge of who lands in the bracket, but you'll decide who moves forward and ultimately wins.

What's next: We'll kick the bracket back to you next week.

Share this

🍕 Karri is so excited to hear other people's pizza faves and hopeful she discovers a hidden spot.

🐍 Sabrina is reading about the 8-foot Bedford County, Virginia python named Nanner that officials are blaming for starting a fire in a middle school classroom.

• The teacher says he's innocent.

Thanks to Alexa Mencia Orozco for editing today's edition

Editor's note: Yesterday's Code Refresh Draft Three story has been corrected to reflect that it says up to five unrelated people could live together (not up to eight).