Commute Champion
Commute Champion Jess Kirkpatrick, at a bagels-and-coffee party thrown by UW Transportation Services for her and her colleagues.
It was in 2005 that Jess Kirkpatrick discovered how much she loved taking the bus to work. At first, it wasn’t by choice. Since 1998, she had driven alone just about every day to her staff position at the University of Washington. But when injuries from a car accident left her unable to drive, Jess found taking the bus to be a surprisingly pleasant alternative. Since then, she’s never looked back.
“It wasn’t until I was forced to use [King County] Metro Transit that I discovered what I’d been missing: time,” Kirkpatrick says. “Time to read, time to build a friendship, time to write, time to do so much that I couldn’t do while driving.” She’s continued to ride the bus to work nearly every day since then.
When the time came for her to buy a house two years ago, she looked only in locations that would allow her to take just one bus to get to campus. She didn’t have room in her budget for the costs of driving to campus every day, but could easily afford a U-PASS – and she didn’t want to drive, anyway. “I didn’t want to have to be in traffic, use so much gasoline, or pay so much for parking all the time,” Kirkpatrick says. “And I get to read a book on the way.”
For her willingness to permanently change her well-established commuting habits – and for her advocacy for the U-PASS program as part of her work at the UW’s Husky Card office – Kirkpatrick is the newest UW Transportation Services Commute Champion.
About half the time, Kirkpatrick walks to a bus stop from her house in Shoreline and takes King County Metro Route 373 straight to campus. The rest of the time – when she drops her daughter and her son off at their schools, not easily accessible by bus from their house – Kirkpatrick drives, parks near her son’s school and takes the bus the rest of the way. Her commute usually takes between 45 and 50 minutes, and she’s saving hundreds of dollars a month compared with past years when she would drive every day.
She still drives to campus occasionally, using the Pay-Per-Use Parking program. But she enjoys her transit commute, she says. Walking to and from the bus provides some nice exercise, and when she has time she’ll keep on walking to the next stop, or get off one stop earlier than usual. And she loves the time she spends on the bus. “I see people knitting, listening to music or audiobooks, catching up on some Z’s, or texting friends or family on the bus,” Kirkpatrick says. “And I see people who sit next to each other every day because they’ve built friendships.” She is one of those people: One of her best friends is someone she met on the Route 373 bus. For her, she says, “taking the bus is smarter than driving.”
When she’s assisting students, staff and faculty at the Husky Card Account and ID Center, she encourages them to give U-PASS a try if they haven’t already – and suggests they download the indispensable OneBusAway app on their smartphones. She simply wants others to be as happy with their commutes as she is with hers.
Do you have a friend or colleague who studies or works at the UW and models smart commute choices? Nominate her or him to be a Commute Champion with our online form.
