Last edited November 20, 2025

The people want a shortcut

An unspoken piece of infrastructure that most of the students at UWaterloo secretly want is a direct shortcut from Lester Street to Phillip Street, ideally close to the Hickory Street connection.

I made a tweet about it that got some traction a while back, which inspired me to try to figure out why we haven't built this yet, and to try to change that.
links to tweet and reddit post. Quite a lot of online support!

Quickly looking on Reddit, we also find lots of other students asking the same questions over the years:
1 2 3

Pre-existing shortcuts

Anecdotally, there have been many more holes in the fence between Lester Street and Phillip Street over the years.

I remember when I was in first year (2021-2022), there was a gaping hole in the fence between 247 Lester Street and the Plaza that required you to make a 3ft jump up or down to cross it, and even that one had pretty decent foot traffic at all times of the day, even though it probably saved like 45 seconds of walking time. It's patched now though.

Somebody even replied to my original tweet with a video even people who made a creative trapdoor in the fence:
tweet

I've also seen at least one other "door in a fence" built in my years at UWaterloo, which has also since been patched.

The people yearn for a shortcut so bad that they're just opting for property damage to get it done!

With this knowledge and momentum, I set off to start a political movement to get this shortcut built. TLDR, the bad news is that this is not really possible to build, and the good news is that it WILL be built, just maybe in a couple decades...

Disclaimer

I'm not a journalist and I did not formally interview anybody with the intention of writing this. I am just writing about what I wanted to do, what I found, and my thoughts. I can be wrong about some of the things mentioned here, and any testimony or confirmation of events I heard came from people with whom I was just having a conversation with at events or such. I'm sharing my interpretation of the story thus far!

Background: What is this shortcut for?

For those that don't go to UWaterloo, or those who do but have only ever lived on Phillip Street (boo), majority of the students that go to UWaterloo live to the east of campus, which is Phillip Street and beyond.

Map showing where most of the people that go to campus live, excluding the campus residences themselves

The main complaint is that for anybody living east of Phillip Street, there is no way to cross Lester to Phillip (or vice versa) without walking all the way north to Columbia St, or south to University Avenue. Admittedly, it's not the longest detour in the world, but considering that Hickory Street is a convenient throughfare for all the streets going east, it's annoying to have a shortcut through everything, just to have to make a detour north or south anyways.

The infamous shortcut that everybody so desires, in an ideal world, looks something like this:

Essentially an extension of Hickory Street, which already lines up almost exactly with the University of Waterloo transit station, where we have lots of buses, and the Ion light rail train.

Transit access aside, such a shortcut would just save a lot of time on my walk to campus. An example of a journey that some poor math student may make a couple of times a week looks something like this (Albert Street to M3):

But it feels so wasteful to walk South onto University Avenue, just to walk back North again when you get to the university. But with the ideal connection between Lester and Phillip it could look something like this:

This path would feel so much better to walk, and is undoubtedly more optimal. Using an online distance tracker, this path is about 200 meters shorter, resulting in roughly 2 minutes and 30 seconds of time savings for an average walker.

More importantly, it just feels bad that this path doesn't exist - having to take what feels like a roundabout way to get to campus, especially when Hickory Street already exists, but seems to just end before it gets to campus.

The movement

I knew that this was something I wanted, and had proof that this was something other students wanted. So I set out to see if we could make things right on Lester. Unfortunately for me though, I'm just a mechatronics engineering student, and don't know a ton about urban planning.
So I did what I do best: I found some experts to talk to for help. I ended up talking to:

Brian Doucet, Associate Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo, who basically referred me to talk to someone from Tritag:
Michael Druker, member of Tritag - a Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge transit advocacy group, who taught me about the Ward system
Ron Ormson, Commissioner, Planning & Public Works for the City of Waterloo
Dorothy McCabe, current Mayor of the City of Waterloo

Through these conversations, I learned that the city actually does have a plan to build this shortcut, which is summarized by this conversation on Reddit:

link
For reference, WCRI is the company that owns the private property on the East side of Phillip Street that this hypothetical shortcut would pass through.
WCRI's property is highlighted in yellow

This narrative that the city does plan on building the shortcut, but is essentially waiting for WCRI to redevelop its townhouses, also came up in my brief conversation with Ron Ormson. In fact, 275 Lester is currently a bare empty lot owned by the city, just waiting to be developed.
And the WCRI townhouses we're waiting to be redeveloped, visible on the other side of this empty lot? Well, that would be the WCRI CCK complex, located at 268 Phillip Street:

Completed in 1986 1 2, this complex is around 39 years old as of today, so its certainly done its time.

The nice thing about WCRI is they are a nonprofit housing co-op, meaning that they are likely to support (and also, I suppose, legally obliged to) building the shortcut between Lester St and Phillip, but it would be a really tough sell to tell them to redevelop sooner just to get this shortcut built. It seems like it's largely up to WCRI management to decide when they want to redevelop their buildings, and we just have to sit and watch until they do.

I suppose with enough political will, we could petition the municipal government and other stakeholders to finance WCRI's redevelopment to accelerate it. But I think that's a hard sell to justify putting money into tearing down perfectly good midrise housing just to shave some minutes off of everyone's commute to campus. Given the amount of housing growth in the region, WCRI will probably eventually redevelop the land into higher density housing in the future anyways.

From the government's POV, it would be giving WCRI extra money for little tangible upside, and from WCRI's perspective, we'd be asking them to reap less reward from their original investment into building the CCK complex.

I also just personally don't feel like bothering a company that, frankly, is doing thousands of students in the region a favor by offering cheap and affordable housing, with yet another selfish request that doesn't benefit them.

So, I decided to not push further to get this built, but I felt like I should at least share what I've learned so that anybody curious about this issue after me can get caught up on the situation.

Edit: Extra information

The neighbourhood encompassing Phillip St and Lester St, going eastward until King Street, and bounded on the north and south by Columbia St W and University Ave respectively, is known as the Northdale neighbourhood, and is a subsection of Ward 6.

The specific plan to build a shortcut connecting Lester Street and Phillip Street was actually laid out in a Northdale Land Use and Community Improvement Plan Study from 2012 (thanks Michael for pointing this out to me), and contains some pretty relevant information from pages 50-53:

Potential New Streets or Pedestrian/Cycling Connection
Potential new streets and or pedestrian/cycling connections have been identified which includes the extension of Hickory Street to Phillip Street ... The future extension of Hickory Street to Phillip Street is viewed as an important public benefit to facilitate additional east west connectivity through Northdale and facilitate connections to the University of Waterloo campus and future rapid transit station, which may consist of a new street and/or a pedestrian connection. A Specific Provision Area is proposed for the Lester/University/Phillip/Columbia Block to assist in securing this public benefit in exchange for increases in development opportunity...

University/Phillip/Columbia/Lester Block (Specific Provision Area 45c)
SPA 45c has been expanded to include the entire University/Phillip/Columbia/Lester Block. It is a priority public benefit to improve the connectivity between Northdale and the University of Waterloo, through this SPA, particularly through the provision of active transportation connections to the University of Waterloo and the proposed rapid transit station. The identification and provision of a potential public street right-of-way, pedestrian corridor, and/or cycling/multi-use route shall be determined through the preparation of Block Plans and through the City’s review of development applications. A future road or active transportation connection from generally Hickory Street to Phillip Street is viewed as an important public benefit to facilitate additional east west connectivity through Northdale and facilitate connections to the University of Waterloo campus and future rapid transit. The intent of this SPA is to establish bonusing provisions under Section 37 of the Planning Act, to permit increases in density in exchange for the provision of a public road connection and/or pedestrian connection to Phillip Street as well as active transportation connections throughout the larger blocks.

So, even back in 2012, the councilor of Ward 6 at the time, Jeff Henry, had made sure to draft plans and intentions to build the Lester-Phillip connection himself. I sadly haven't been able to speak to him myself to find out why things fell through... but I did manage to find out that WCRI, alongside the other Phillip Street property owners, are all opposed to this project:

[Concerns in opposition of building a shortcut between Phillip St and Lester St] were voiced by Leslie Kocsis, who owns properties on Philip Street, and Michael Trussell, who was speaking on behalf of Waterloo Cooperative Residence Incorporated (WCRI).

Both expressed the opinion that linkage via Philip Street would inhibit the development of their properties.

"We believe that these proposed corridors will severely compromise the ability of the WCRI to provide safe and secure living conditions for its members," Trussell asserted.

Just an extra nail in the coffin on the fact that the timeline on this pathway is entirely up to WCRI, and is likely out of our hands as students.

I hope I get to speak to Jeff Henry about this proposal, and why the shortcut path isn't built yet, some time in the future. It sounded like his hope was to have Hickory Street extended to the University of Waterloo transit station itself, not just a pedestrian shortcut, so it's interesting to see us get neither.

Edit: A bandaid solution?

written November 20, 2025
My friend Shaan made a suggestion for a temporary path that seems like a somewhat feasible temporary solution:

This would make use of the empty lot at 275 Lester street, and would require building a sidewalk/path of sorts on the parking lot separation line.

I'm not sure if this is even legal to build, as it would build the path pretty close to the backside of the CCK complex, and the band of land separating the two parking lots where we would build the "sidewalk" might not be wide enough to support the volume of students that would use it every day.

I might do some asking around to see how feasible this is, but my gut is that it's pretty improbable, especially given how disruptive it would be to the residents of the CCK.

Conclusion

The city owns a plot of land, 275 Lester Street, that is completely empty, and waiting to be developed into a "park" that will act as the connection between Lester St and Phillip St. It's intended to be connected to Phillip St via the land currently being used by the WCRI CCK complex.
The park will be built whenever WCRI redevelops the CCK complex, which they will have to do eventually because it's already 39 years old. The problem is that the timeline on redeveloping could be as long as another couple decades.
This isn't an issue that the City isn't aware of - in 2012 we see talks about extending Hickory Street to Phillip; it's likely that the city has been meaning to do something about this connection for longer than that
WCRI seems to really dislike the idea of building this connection, and so might actually be adversarial in its construction.

Overall, I'm glad the city is aware of the situation and has a plan put forth to build what the students, who are ultimately the residents, want. It just sucks that the timeline is so long, and completely in the hands of the private property owners.

Thank you for reading - I hope this was informative for somebody. Feel free to shoot me a message on LinkedIn or X or something if you want to talk more about this situation.