Ride with Candidates:  Shawn Humes – Waterloo Ward 2

For the 2026 municipal elections, CycleWR volunteers have been taking municipal electoral candidates on bike rides to show off the best and worst of the cycling infrastructure in their ward/city/region.

Below is a summary written by CycleWR volunteer Amber Szuche on their ride with municipal candidate for Waterloo Ward 2, Shawn Humes.

Disclaimer: CycleWR is a non-partisan organization that does not endorse a party or candidate. Summaries are written by volunteers or candidates and may not reflect the mandate or views of CycleWR. For more information, contact us at hello@cyclewr.ca.

I met up with Shawn Humes, who is running for Ward 2, for a bicycle ride starting at Conestoga Mall. We headed south on King street on the multi-use paths, which nicely separate cars from everyone else. I took him on a brief detour up the multi-use path on Weber street to show him the intersections at Weber & Milford and Weber & Blythwood, where I have been hit four times by drivers who turn without looking! We then went back to King & Weber to head south on King, where there is an inexplicable gap in cycling infrastructure for the single block between Weber and Columbia. As we went down the protected bike lanes on the hill from Columbia to University, Shawn remarked that it felt like slalom skiing with the amount of swerving necessary to avoid the many manhole covers in that bike lane. 

We continued Uptown on the bike lanes that are slightly different colour than the sidewalk and tried our best not to startle any pedestrians. Shawn showed me some spots where future bike path developments are planned around Uptown and pointed out the need for better wayfinding signage for bike routes and trails. We then went up Albert, which starts as sharrows then briefly has protected bike lanes from Seagram to University, at which point there is again an inexplicable gap in any cycling infrastructure until Columbia, where protected bike lanes resume again. 

Shawn let me know about Annual Average Daily Traffic, the metric that the city uses to determine what type of cycling infrastructure each street should have. He wants Waterloo to openly publish street-level Annual Average Daily Traffic data, which Kitchener is already doing. 

Overall, we had a great ride and got to talk a lot about the broad diversity of cycling infrastructure in Waterloo!