The intersections of opposite Schubert cells have a very nice decomposition into products of tori and affine spaces due to Deodhar which, of course, induces such a decomposition of the Richardson. This decomposition is defined over $\mathbb{Z}$ (actually it works in any building), so it lets you count points, and the strata are combinatorially described by special subwords of a reduced decomposition of one of the words. I recommend reading the paper of Marsh and Rietsch.Marsh and Rietsch.