Commute Champion Recognition Program

Commuter Services strives to provide innovative and sustainable transportation solutions that facilitate the educational, research, cultural and service missions of the University. Through the U-PASS program, Commuter Services helps University commuters make smart transportation choices that are good for the environment, enhance the quality of life in the area around the University, and are good for the health and pocketbooks of commuters.

Commuter Services and U-PASS have started a new Commute Champion Recognition Program which will help to recognize individuals in the UW community who model smart commute choices. Each quarter a new Commute Champion will be chosen from peer nominations and honored with an award certificate and a $50.00 Visa gift card during a surprise presentation. The Commute Champion will be featured in a story on the Commuter Services website, in the Commuter Services Newsletter, and in the Commuter Services Lobby. Their picture, along with their title of Commute Champion, may also be displayed on UW Shuttle buses for all to see.

Nominations will be accepted throughout the quarter but must be submitted by the last day of the quarter. A new Commute Champion will be named during the beginning of each new quarter. If your nominee is not selected during the quarter you submitted their name, they will still be eligible to win Commute Champion for up to one year. All nominations will expire after one year.

If you know someone who deserves to be a Commute Champion, nominate them today!

Commuter Champion Yang-Sook Choe

Congratulations to Yang-Sook Choe, our first ever Commute Champion! For nearly 20 years, Yang-Sook Choe, Program Manager for Area C Custodial Division, woke up at 3:00 a.m. to make her drive-alone commute from Edmonds and get to campus early enough to help shuttle some of her staff from the Northlake Building to their clock-in site at the Old Fisheries Building. About three years ago, Yang-Sook joined the U-PASS vanpool program and it has changed her commute forever. Now she can sleep in an extra half hour and still cut 10 minutes off of her commute time by using the high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes.

Yang-Sook has become such a vanpool advocate that over the past three years she has helped almost every new Custodial Services employee join a vanpool. This means that Custodial Services can now boast of having 11 vanpools with more than 70 participants.

Yang-Sook says that the most common question new vanpoolers have is how to fill out the required paperwork. She has taken it upon herself to help her fellow employees fill out their vanpool paper work correctly and fax it to the appropriate transit agency. She’s also assisted with scheduling for each new vanpooler’s vanpool orientation session. Yang-Sook is so good at helping people set-up vanpools that most new employees assume she works for the transit agency as a representative for vanpooling. Keep up the great work Yang-Sook and thank you for being a Commute Champion!