The Club faces unique logistical challenges including transporting youth players (who are mostly under 16 years old and unable to drive themselves) to practice, competing with other soccer clubs and sports to reserve field time from Seattle Parks (fields can be unusable due to turf conditions, lack of field amenities, and safety concerns), and scheduling field time that is released one or two months in advance.
Students in Prof. Anne Goodchild’s Civil & Environmental Engineering CET 587 course: Transportation and Logistics studied strategies to identify viable transportation solutions and reduce individual athlete and team VMT and commuting time to practice and games, and proposed several different recommendations to Seattle United staff and board, including:
- Assigning inter-team carpools: Implementing assigned coordinated carpools to games and practices based on residence, regardless of team assignments, reducing VMT emissions, carbon emissions, and burden on families.
- Implementing group practices based on region: Developing “pod” practice sessions to assign players to the closest fields based on home address, reducing VMT and travel time, and assisting in scheduling.
- Creating a shuttle service with collection points: Developing a microtransit system with designated collection points to serve as catchment areas to consolidate athletes to desired locations along the shuttle service route (including both origins and destinations), increasing predictability and reliability, decreasing VMT and travel time and splitting transportation burden between Seattle United and the athletes themselves. In addition, shuttles could drive in HOV lanes.
- Allocating team practice fields according to player locations: Players would be assigned to the nearest fields to their locations, which would decrease travel time and VMT.