Travel options from Waterloo

Posted by Patrick Lam on Wednesday, August 6, 2008

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Travel options from Waterloo

I’ve tried to figure out various options for carless transportation from Waterloo. Here’s what I’ve discovered.

To Pearson Airport

  • Airways Transit option 1, door-to-door: 1.5hr, $80 for one direction. You have to wait for everyone to get on and off. They do tend to drive at reasonable highway speed.
  • Airways Transit option 2, Airporter: 2 hours from the UW Student Life Centre, limited schedules (departs 6am, 10:45am, 1:00pm, 3:30pm; returns 8:15am, 1:30pm, 3:15pm, 6:13pm) and even less on weekends. $46 per direction.
  • Greyhound to Toronto ($22, 1.5 hours) and Pearson airport express ($20). About the same cost as the Airporter, but more hassle and more schedules available. Cheaper if you have a student card.
  • Get to Mississauga Square One (works if you can take the FEDS bus) and then take the GO service to the airport ($3.50). Can be extremely cheap, if you can make it work for you, and probably isn’t all that slow either.

To Buffalo Airport

All reasonable options cost about $65.

  • Take Coach Canada to Hamilton (dep 8:30, 1.25 hours, $16) at 8:30. Take jetways.ca to BUF (dep 11:30, 2.25 hours, $50). For the return, there is a jetways.ca shuttle at 7:30PM, but then no good way of getting back to Kitchener that evening.
  • There is a 3 hour Greyhound from Hamilton that departs at 10pm, but that is pretty horrible.
  • For returning from BUF to Kitchener, there is also a 6:30pm Coach Canada schedule that arrives at 10:30pm; that requires a taxi to the bus station ($15, I’m told). The whole is comparable in cost to the jetways shuttle.