- An analysis by The Narwhal has found that the recent changes to Winnipeg Transit's network have disproportionately affected less affluent areas. Overall, there was a reduction in the number of stops from 11 per km2 to 7 per km2, but neighbourhoods in the North End and downtown lost 2-3 times as many stops as the city average, while suburban ones lost the fewest. Now admittedly, there's a kind of logic to that if you want to use Transit's limited budget to minimize the number of people who drive - more North End residents will continue to lump it, simply because they can't afford a car. Even more cynically, one might reason that reducing the number of stops in poorer neighbourhoods will reduce the number of people who use the bus as a shelter, thus making it more attractive to suburbanites. Urban planning professor Orly Linovski pretty much admits this when she says that Transit has two distinct goals - to better serve those who already use it and to encourage people with other options to take the bus, and that those two goals "can be in conflict"; nonetheless, she questions whether the approach taken is good social policy. There's also the fact that there's a tradeoff between fast service and having a lot of stops. And indeed, on the major routes with frequent service, there really has been an improvement - but this comes at a cost to people with mobility issues, and will also not seem so attractive when it's -30°C out, or if you have to walk through a sketchy neighbourhood to get to your bus stop. And the cuts to late night service have also disproportionately affected poorer areas.
- Winnipeg's city council is considering strict limits on where homeless encampments will be tolerated. Among the prohibited locations will be within 50 metres of schools or children's recreational facilities, which is fine, but it also includes anywhere within 30 metres of a transit shelter, bridges, docks or piers and within 50 metres of a rail line; those restrictions seem a lot harder to justify (prohibiting encampments in a transit shelter might be fair game, but near?) and when you combine all the restrictions it becomes an interesting question about where such people will still be allowed to exist. We'll have to see how the courts deal with it; an Ontario court has previously ruled that municipalities can't have blanket prohibitions if there isn't enough shelter space for all the encampment residents. Even site-specific restrictions have been struck down.
- Brazil's Supreme Court is set to rule today on the fate of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is being tried for his version of Jan 6 that occurred following his electoral defeat in 2022. Among the other accusations he faces is that he was aware of a plot to assassinate the legitimate president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Donald Trump has imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods and has imposed personal sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, calling the trial "political persecution". The country, of course, is deeply divided over the issue.
- A WestJet Boeing 737-800 from Toronto was substantially damaged following a collapse of the right main landing gear upon landing at Princess Juliana International Airport in Sint Maarten. Passengers and crew escaped without major injury. Most of the news stories have described this as a "hard landing", which implicitly sounds like it's blaming the pilots (i.e. they landed too hard and broke the airplane), but according to Juan Browne (blancolirio) there's a history of similar failures in that aircraft type, including one involving an Alaska Airlines flight in 2023, and nothing about the WestJet flight's approach seemed to suggest that the crew were doing anything wrong.
- A man in Prince George, BC was pulled over while driving a child-size Barbie jeep along one of the city's major routes to go to the 7-11 for a Slurpee. He was arrested after failing a breathalyzer test and already had a suspended license.
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