I'm back in Toronto. And another "fresh pow annual" is in the books.

The BC interior is a specific kind of ski and snowboard trip. It's not about dancing on tables in neon onesies while Champagne gondolas fly overhead. It's about chasing champagne powder with like-minded middle-aged men, all pretending that they don't otherwise live a sedentary, low-range-of-motion lifestyle for the balance of the year.

Both have their merits.

We stayed in four different accommodations for this trip, and one of the things that became very apparent is that everyone is trying to over-optimize around "good service." In each case, I was getting text messages and emails before the stay, during the stay, and after the stay.

"Here's how to prepare before check-in." "Is there anything we can do to make your stay more enjoyable?" "How was your stay?" "Please share your experience with us here." In one case, I even received a phone call from the front desk as soon as I got to my room: "We just wanted to see if everything in your room is to your liking."

On the one hand, this level of communication and responsiveness is fantastic when you do need something. But on the other hand, it can be overwhelming. Blasting everyone with automated text messages and emails does not, in my opinion, stand out as exceptional hospitality, especially since everyone now seems to be doing it.

Outstanding hospitality is emotional, rather than technical.

In city-building news, Bloomberg recently published an article about why cities should embrace "messiness." In it, they cite a book that was assembled by some fellow Torontonians:

This premise — that urban planning’s efforts to impose order risk editing out the culture, character, complexity and creative friction that makes cities cities — is a guiding theme in Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, a collection of essays, including Thorne’s, gathered by Toronto-based editors Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, Dylan Reid and John Lorinc. In it, they argue that “messiness is an essential element of the city.” Case studies from around the world show how imperfection can be embraced, created and preserved, from the informal street eateries of East Los Angeles to the sports facilities carved out of derelict spaces in Mumbai.

Messiness and allowing for ground-up urban interventions are themes that I have written a lot about on this blog over the years. I think we have gone overboard with rules and regulations, to the point that we stamp out many of the things that make cities so wonderful.

Top-down planning will never get everything right. It's impossible. And the big thing about over-planning is that, in the end, we don't actually know what we're missing out on. We don't know what might have been possible if only we had allowed for it or were more flexible in our approaches.

Messiness is a feature of cities, not a bug. We should be embracing it.

Yesterday morning, I took the train from Toronto to Montréal. I'm here for one night for a few meetings. I love trains. You can show up right before departure, the seats are more spacious, and they go downtown to downtown. Plus, there's something romantic to me about whizzing through the landscape. But currently, this trip takes just over 5 hours once you factor in the above stops (see cover photo). That's too long in this day and age, so Canada is, as I understand it, working on a new high-speed rail solution called Alto.

The first phase will connect Ottawa to Montréal (construction is expected to start in 2029), and a subsequent phase will connect Ottawa to Toronto. The top speed will be around 300 km/h, which I'm guessing will result in an effective speed closer to 200 km/h when you factor in stops and any speed limits required near urban centers. With this, the goal is to bring the journey from Toronto to Montréal down to around 3 hours.

One thing to keep in mind is that Ottawa does not lie on the fastest route between Toronto and Montréal; it adds about 70 km. But it's of course necessary. In theory, an express route with no stops running TGV or Shinkansen-like trains could bring the journey time down closer to 2 hours. But that's not what is being planned from what I have read. Regardless, 3 hours is still a big deal and a meaningful improvement. It makes the trip faster than flying, and certainly faster than driving.

Could current drive times ultimately change with autonomous vehicles? Maybe, but it's unlikely to be by this much. I hate long road trips and the same would be true even if a robot were driving me. So I look forward to one day — in my 50s? — doing this journey in 3 hours. If we could get it down to 2 hours and change, that much better. That's a trip worth taking for a night out or just to stock up on bagels.

Whether you live in North Dakota or Texas, there's a reasonable chance that when you travel internationally, you enjoy going to Cancun. Or perhaps you fly into Cancun and then go to a neighboring town like Tulum. United Airlines just released the following map showing the most-booked international destinations from every state for passengers traveling on United Airlines between January and October 2025. The top three destinations are London, Cancun, and Tokyo:

First, it's important to keep in mind that this data only includes people flying on United; it doesn't capture all international air travel. Second, maps like this are necessarily going to be influenced by an airline's biggest hubs. In the case of United, its hub-and-spoke model relies on major airports and routes like San Francisco-Tokyo and Newark-Heathrow.

Still, specific destinations appear on this map for a reason. Cancun is the number one "vacation" airport for Americans, which is an incredible success story, because it wasn't a place until the 1970s. Prior to Cancun, Acapulco was Mexico's top resort destination, but it was becoming constrained, and the government needed a replacement conduit for extracting US dollars from the American middle class. So, they developed Cancun.

The popularity of Tokyo is likely partly a result of a weaker yen, in addition to being an important Asian hub and an incredible place to visit. According to the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), over 2.7 million Americans visited the country in 2024 — a 33% year-over-year increase and a 58% increase compared to 2019.

The country also saw 3.7 million international visitors in January 2025, which is the highest ever for a single month. Countries like the US and Canada also set all-time records for January arrivals. Part of this, I'm sure, has to do with Japan's legendary "Japow." I was part of this year's cohort, and I've never seen so much snow as I did on the island of Hokkaido.

There are also very specific one-off relationships that appear on United's map. The number one destination for the state of Arizona is, for example, Taipei. And this is being driven by a semiconductor boom, specifically Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's direct investment in the state. At the time, it was heralded as "the largest foreign direct investment in a greenfield project in American history."

So, there's a lot that can be gleaned from a map like this. If we were to zoom out and look at all international air travel, we would likely see some reordering. I suspect Paris would jump ahead of airports like Vancouver, given its hub status for other airlines. But it's unlikely you'd see a completely different list. Americans fly east to London, south to Cancun, west to Tokyo, and north to Toronto. These are the primary hub airports.

Cover photo by Yu Kato on Unsplash