October 1, 2009
Choe is a champion — in smart commuting
Yang-Sook Choe, program manager for Area C Custodial Division, has been named the first ever “Commute Champion” by UW Transportation Services. The Commute Champion Recognition Program honors individuals in the UW community who embrace smart commute choices and help others do the same.
Choe used to wake up at 3 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, she 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 her commute time by using the high-occupancy vehicle lanes.
Choe has become such a vanpool advocate that over the past three years she has helped almost every new Custodial Services employee join a vanpool. She says 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 do that correctly and to fax the papers to the appropriate transit agency. She’s also assisted with scheduling for each new vanpooler’s vanpool orientation session. Choe 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.
Thanks to Choe’s initiative, Custodial Services now boasts 11 vanpools with more than 70 participants.
The Commute Champions program is open to the entire UW community, so if you know someone who deserves to be a Commute Champion, click here to nominate him or her. A new Commute Champion will be chosen every quarter from peer nominations and honored with an award certificate and a $50 Visa gift card during a surprise presentation. Commute Champions will be featured on the Commuter Services Web site, in the Transportation Services Newsletter, and in the Commuter Services lobby. Their pictures, along with the title of Commute Champion, may also be displayed inside UW Shuttle buses.
Nominations will be accepted throughout each 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. Your nominee will be eligible to win the Commute Champion award for up to one year after submission. All nominations expire after one year.
