On Sept. 5, Grand River Transit resumed the “late night loop” after its discontinuation in 2019. Catered towards the student population, route 91 runs Thursday to Saturday from midnight to 2 a.m. Every 30 minutes, buses will run from Queen Station in downtown Kitchener to University of Waterloo Station, providing students a safe, accessible, and cost-friendly way home.  

The night transit campaign started in March 2024 as the UW NDP Club partnered with UW Climate Justice Ecosystem (CJE) to receive over 1,200 signatures for their petition. The motion was brought in support by regional councillor Colleen James, who encouraged and reassured the delegates, helping many students feel comfortable to speak out at the regional council meeting. On April 24, 2024, more than 15 delegations were heard, many of which were from UW students who expressed the need for night transit. 

“Night transit is an integral part of a safe, accessible, and well-connected city,” said Michelle Angkasa, former co-lead of UW CJE and now an alumni of UW’s environment and business program. Other students expressed their concern of having “no good way home” after a long night of studying on campus or a late night out with friends. The lack of night transportation resulted in cancelling plans, walking home alone, and added financial strain. Additionally, points were raised that night transit would allow students to live farther away from campus where more affordable housing options lie. 

After the delegations, the council voted in favour to reinstate the service, marking a successful campaign. 

Damian Mikhail, a fifth-year statistics student at UW, lead organizer of the campaign, and co-president of the NDP Club at the time, described the process as “stressful.” He recognized that many students had already believed in the benefits of night transit, thus marketing the campaign was the biggest obstacle. “It’s a lot less about garnering support because a lot of students already see the benefits of something like night transit. It was a lot more about trying to get the word out, about the campaign, so that we could keep that pressure on council,” Mikhail said. 

However, he recognized the immense amount of support and investment from the community: “What you quickly realize is just how many people can be there to help. We had an amazing volunteer base, especially our marketing team [who were] just people from outside of the club who just kind of decided they wanted to volunteer some time to make posters, make posts for us… So getting to work with such a dedicated team of volunteers was super, super helpful. It was just really kind of like, grassroots effort, right? All I kind of had to do was make sure we’re keeping our messaging direct and we keep things moving.”

On the first night that route 91 began running, students involved in the initiative gathered at Crabby Joe’s in Kitchener, which was conveniently located next to the first stop of the route. This was also the place they celebrated in April after the successful vote. “We all got on the bus together for that first route — that was quite exciting. There was a lot of clapping for everybody who got on the bus, which you know, [caught] quite a few of the people who didn’t know what was happening off-guard. Everyone seemed very excited about that — about the idea. People were very excited to find out that they were on the first bus,” Mikhail said. 

A positive sentiment buzzes around the late night loop as more students and workers access the service. “I’ve heard from friends and people generally just talking to me about them taking the night bus for the first time. I had a friend who was stuck downtown Kitchener for a while [and] was trying to figure out how to get home. They realized that the night bus was running, so he sent me a picture with him on the night bus, coming home. So that was pretty cool to see,” Mikhail said.

“It’s nice that we’re finally moving towards more late night transit,” said Andrew Yang, a fourth-year ARBUS student at UW. “It’s something I wish I had in the first four years of being at [Waterloo].” Previously in his undergrad, the options were limited to walking, splitting an Uber, or taking the Neuron, which were either inconvenient, expensive, or a mix of both. 

Yang added that the route was better than expected: “I felt like it was going to be only Waterloo, but it’s actually Waterloo and downtown Kitchener, which is nice. So at least there’s a little bit of an extra reach… It’s nice how it goes a little bit further north than I expected as well. I thought it would only go to Columbia but it’s nice that it’s going through a little bit of Hazel [and] Albert.”

Mikhail mentioned possibilities for an expansion with night transit, such as extending the service for the whole week or adding an extra route for greater reach: “We’ve had a couple of our delegates who couldn’t make it to the night bus celebration because it was too late and the night bus didn’t reach their home. So there is still some missing demand that we need to reach. It depends on what staff comes back [with], because it’s mostly left up to their discretion how they report back to council, but we do expect one of the possibilities to be whole week, and the other one to be some extra routes, so we’ll have to see.” 

The NDP Club plans to continue the activism in the future when it comes to expanding the night bus, on top of other initiatives they expect to see coming this term.