It’s Amazon intern season again and Metro is adding buses to handle them

It’s become an annual tradition: Right around the summer solstice, Amazon’s summer interns arrive in Seattle in droves and King County Metro adds bus service to try to keep them – and the rest of us – moving.

For the fourth year in a row, about 900 Amazon interns are staying at the University of Washington this summer. Amazon’s corporate housing partner is paying the UW about $4.4 million to house and feed them, a UW spokesman said.

And for at least the second year in a row, Metro is adding buses to the popular Route 70 to help ferry all those interns from the UW campus to Amazon’s South Lake Union campus, and back again.

Metro added two daily buses to the route in March and three more this month, the latter to accommodate “continued growth in South Lake Union and an influx of summer interns,” Metro spokesman Scott Gutierrez said.

“This is similar to adjustments made the last few years,” Gutierrez said. “We’ll monitor closely for the next few weeks.”

Amazon is also operating four private shuttles a day to transport interns between the campuses, a spokeswoman said.

Here’s our story from last year on how Amazon interns – just the interns – can overwhelm bus routes causing both service changes and commuting headaches for other passengers down the line: The Amazon effect: Metro adds buses to handle new flock of summer interns.