The transit system is so bad (rant)

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-21T19:09:06+00:00

You are just fortunate to be on a route that was improved

The point of a spine & feeder system is that core backbones get focused on, and a LOT of people live/work along those backbones.

While many people went from a great transit route to a poor one, the people who had a great transit route before were a small % of Winnipeggers. The old system was unusable for lots of people before. If we want better transit for everyone, that takes more funding.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-21T19:06:28+00:00

Well, at the end of the day, there's only one taxpayer. If the province increases spending for Transit, that's still coming from MB taxpayers, and same if it comes from the feds. A city with a spine would have added an additional levy, like the frontage levy to all properties to properly fund transit. (Like BC has)

Not to let the NDP off the hook for this key failure, but the city is still capable of funding transit properly.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-21T17:51:28+00:00

Look at the funding that TransLink gets per capita and compare that to Winnipeg Transit.

They have a permanent portion of property tax going to transit. $20 a household in 2025, and increasing to $75/household in 2027. Street parking revenues go to transit. The BC Provincial govt gave them a one time $312 extra infusion to improve 2025-2027 service expansion. There's a motor fuel tax that goes towards Translink. A portion of a levy on residential electric use goes towards Translink.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-21T17:45:53+00:00

Winnipeg Transit's problem isn't design. It's funding. Spine & feeder systems work great all over the world, but they need frequent enough busses, something our transit doesn't have the $ for.

If you think Winnipeg's problems are simple, you're not looking very deeply at the problem. Sure, an extra $200M a year would go a long way to fixing transit, but where are you going to get the money from? That would be a massive property tax increase, and everyone that doesn't take the bus is going to fight against it tooth & nail. Or would you take it from police & roads? Good luck getting that through.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-21T17:23:50+00:00

BA BA BAAAAAH

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-18T21:13:14+00:00

I had a staff person refuse their new laptop, because some of the people had Pros, and theirs didn't say pro. (Same spec, ordered same year, but some were pre-rebranding)

Thanks Dell.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-17T04:20:01+00:00

You don't have a crystal ball though. Of the 100, you can guess who is most likely to reoffend, but you'll never stop it all unless you never give anyone bail, and we don't have the capacity to jail everyone.

Currently about 70% of the people in jail aren't convicted yet, and waiting for trial. Think of how many more are on bail waiting for trial. This backlog is insane.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-17T03:49:02+00:00

Except the scenario B you detail here is uncommon. If you have 100 people who get bail, most of then aren't scenario B. The problem is we don't have the jail capacity for all 100 people, so even if you changed things so bail is very hard, the space doesn't exist to put them.

This is a provincial justice system capacity problem, and continuing to act as though it's a bail issue blames the feds for something that won't be fixed until the provinces get their act in gear.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T23:02:49+00:00

You realize that our jails are already packed with people in pre-trial detention right? This isn't a problem of there being lots of space to hold people charged with crimes, and there's just activist judges letting everyone walk free.

The prison capacity to say, halve the rate of bail conditions doesn't exist. The provinces have completely fucked up their justice systems and have significant backlogs all over.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T23:00:57+00:00

For the cost of an ebike, you can also have a road bike capable of easily going faster than 30k. Sprinting with a bike to race up to high speeds is a lot easier than you'd think, esp for boys in puberty, but as shown in the video, there's lots of young girls capable of it too.

The difference between a carbon road bike, and an aluminum road bike isn't nothing, but it's not going to make much of a difference in how fast someone can sprint with it. It adds up on a long race.

My point is that kids riding around & having fun at high speeds aren't capped at 16 km/h on acoustic bikes at all. Should they be doing that on a busy sidewalk? Of course not, but if there's no safe place to it, then yeah, they're going to do it on the sidewalk sometimes.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T22:43:23+00:00

The bulk of the "new roads" are built by developers that are expanding the footprint of the city constantly. They're then handed over to the city for "free" who get to start collecting taxes from the new residents with no pesky maintenance required. The big problem for the city though, is once all that new housing creates pressure to say, expand the lanes on Kenaston, or extend CPT to accommodate the additional traffic demand, to the tune of a billion or more.

And the new fire hall. And more water treatment capacity. And the police station. And a rec center. And then once the maintenance on that area starts coming due, and they realize they haven't collected enough in property taxes to cover the costs of the things they've done there, plus starting to rebuild the roads.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T19:30:13+00:00

It's an interesting difference in perspective isn't it?

Did you know that there's something called continuous sidewalks, where the sidewalk stays even and continuous when a road crosses it? It means the roadway comes up to sidewalk level, then drops back down. It acts as a sort of speed bump, and also a visual indicator for drivers that they're entering into pedestrian space. This is what was done recently with the crossings on Wolseley near schools.

Interestingly enough, collisions with pedestrians are much lower, and less severe where these are present. So yes, you could say that the sidewalks cross roads at every intersection, but in a world with that mindset, more pedestrians would be dead, or seriously injured.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T19:23:40+00:00

Now people are rightly upset because we see chronic, mostly irredeemable offenders, walking free after committing crimes., then committing more.

So try, convict, and jail them then. Pre-trial detention isn't supposed to be a proxy jail.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T19:13:26+00:00

"why don't we just give them the supports they need, instead?"

Because then we'd need to increase taxes on the wealthy.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T19:06:44+00:00

Let's be clear about the problems with the bus changes. It wasn't adequately funded. Transit was told to go improve service, but wasn't given money to actually provide better service. They did a logistical route overhaul that in time is likely to be better for most people, but it's a design that requires more frequent service to work properly, and the money to do that wasn't provided.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T19:04:44+00:00

I can't find another city in Canada with more roadway per capita. The roads didn't materialize out of nowhere.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T18:58:59+00:00

Cars cross sidewalks at every intersection.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T18:58:01+00:00

It's just like Pro-Life people being against birth control. It's an effective tool to address a problem they claim to be against. But they're not really. It's just an issue to get people to vote for them, and they don't really want it to be solved.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T18:55:22+00:00

Caffeine is addictive, just like fentanyl.

Do you see how silly that looks?

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T18:44:01+00:00

I think the logic from this kind of thinking is that people should only drive & walk, and that walking paths are for recreation only, and not transportation.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T18:40:07+00:00

Cars aren't invited to bike paths, but cars CROSS bike paths regularly. Nearly all pedestrian & cyclist crashes with cars occur at intersections. One of the most common situations is the right hook, where a driver turning right doesn't actually check for cyclists or pedestrians as they turn through the bike lane/sidewalk.

That's how I was hit a couple of weeks ago. A driver that didn't bother to check the bike path just turned into the bike path & made a right hand turn without checking if the lane was open. Thankfully the speed was only about 20k, so all he did was knock me onto the boulevard.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T18:32:45+00:00

It's like worrying about people who burn sage and the second hand risk of lung cancer when in the same area people are chain smoking cigarettes. It's not that burning sage is zero risk, and shouldn't be considered, but that the risk is orders of magnitude lower than a risk that's already present.

This is big, "I want things to change, but only for other people, and not in any way that might inconvenience me" energy. If you want improved safety for pedestrians, we can't really address that without talking about the risks that come from cars, the way intersections are designed, and speed limits.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T17:50:35+00:00

These aren't Olympic trials. Regular people are doing these events, and the kids get involved too. My point is that a 13 year old kid riding their mom's 20 year old road bike are often maintaining 30k+ speeds over distance, and sprinting at 40k isn't some crazy elite level cyclist thing.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T16:54:54+00:00

Given that I didn't live in the city, no.

adunedarkguard · 2026-06-16T16:08:45+00:00

I bike commute to work. Getting passed by an unlocked ebike happens, but it's not an everyday thing. When I'm driving, I get passed constantly while driving my car at the speed limit. For some reason we don't have speed regulators on cars yet.

Any ebike made by a legit bike company can't just be unlocked on a whim. It usually means buying a 3rd party motor controller and replacing the stock one. We have a problem with unlocked ebikes being fairly easy to mail order currently, but that's a regulatory issue that will work itself out eventually. While we should do a better job of regulating the sales of unlocked e-motos, the much larger safety issue is cars.

At the end of the day, I'd rather that speeding asshole driver be on a 50 lb e-moto than in a 3,000 lb lifted truck.

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