Davisville

The Capitol Corridor trains that connect Davis with the Bay Area and Sacramento are evolving as the service recovers from the pandemic. The corridor is adding passenger cars and resuming a full weekday schedule this year, experimenting with a tap-on/tap-off payment system to eventually replace tickets, and proceeding with plans to change access in Davis so that passengers board from an expanded center platform reached via an underpass (or perhaps an overpass) from the parking lot and Olive Drive.

Longer term, the service plans to shift to hydrogen or possibly electric power for its trains. We talk about all this, as well as this year's ridership trends and efforts to improve their timekeeping, on Davisville with Rob Padgette, managing director of the service. Today’s program updates our conversation about the corridor from early 2022.

In winter 2023 we talked with Andy Jones and Margaret Merrill of UC Davis about ChatGPT, a new artificial-intelligence app that was setting off alarms for its advanced ability to "write" reports and articles. On today’s Davisville they report that among the faculty they work with, the sense of panic present then has now eased “quite a bit.” People know more about the limits of chatbots, and are asking more about how and where to use the tools in teaching, instead of just fearing them as a plagiarism machine.

We talk about handling chatbot hallucinations, resisting the biases that chatbots suck into their text databases, and hear a few examples of how UC Davis instructors are using the tools in their classrooms.

Finding information and news about Davis is harder than it should be. The Enterprise still prints and posts local stories, but lacks the scope and heft it had before the rise of internet technology decimated newspapers as a business. Other paid sources of news and information have also retreated, turning what used to be a town commons for communication into a series of walled gardens, with information about local events and news scattered across a variety of formats, outlets, and channels. If the information is present at all.

Autumn Labbe-Renault, the executive director of Davis Media Access (the parent of KDRT), thinks DMA could work with the community to create a new source of information and news about Davis, and eventually Yolo County. The venture has the working title of civic information hub. The idea is in its very early stages, and we talk about it today on Davisville.

The Artery co-op/gallery/store turns 50 this year. Most of its downtown Davis neighbors from the 1970s are gone, so how has the Artery lasted? Heidi Bekebrede and Adele Shaw, two of its members, list several reasons on today’s Davisville, and some might surprise you — they include the hours (most art galleries don’t open daily), the variety (most don’t display so many artists), members who work in the shop, turnover that brings in new artists, fresh displays, and a town with lots of people interested in the arts. The train station a block away helps too.

We also talk about the store’s name, how they find members, the other meaning of “cute” in Bekebrede’s Cuteware, the way Putah Creek inspires Shaw’s paintings, and how managing a 32-machine laundromat in San Francisco introduced Shaw to first- and second-hand stories of her neighborhood from many decades before.