Chevy Chase's New Home-Game Ritual: A $1 Shuttle and a Torn-Up Euclid Avenue

Walk out onto Euclid Avenue this week and you'll find two things that have never shared the block before. Traffic cones stacked along the curb from South Ashland to High Street, left there by an overnight paving crew. And a laminated schedule zip-tied to a lamppost near Bear & The Butcher, listing shuttle times to Kroger Field for a dollar.

Neither project caused the other. One is a water main job that's been grinding along since 2025. The other is a brand-new transit stop that showed up with UK football season. But this month they're overlapping on the same four blocks of Chevy Chase's commercial spine, and that overlap is worth understanding if you live here, because it changes how a home-game Saturday actually works right now, and it hints at something more permanent about the neighborhood's relationship to Euclid Avenue.

Two Projects, One Street, No Connection Between Them

The paving is the easier one to explain. Kentucky American Water has been replacing a main under Euclid and High Street since 2025, and the final surface work started September 16. Because full daytime closures would strangle a commercial strip that depends on foot traffic, the contractor, ATS Construction, is doing the work overnight. The Euclid and High intersection closed from 7 p.m. Wednesday to 7 a.m. Thursday for prep. Then, starting at 8 p.m. Friday and running through 6 a.m. Monday, the Euclid and Ashland intersection closes too, along with the stretch of Euclid between South Ashland and High.

That's the friction. It's temporary, it's scheduled overnight specifically so it doesn't collide with daytime business, and it ends once the crew finishes.

The shuttle is the part that isn't going away when the cones do.

The Bus That Didn't Used to Stop Here

For as long as most residents can remember, Chevy Chase's role on a UK home-game Saturday was passive. The neighborhood sits close enough to Kroger Field that game traffic spilled onto residential streets, but there was never a formal way to get from here to there without driving into it yourself. That changed this season. A downtown shuttle route now has a stop on Euclid Avenue, running for three hours before kickoff and an hour after the final whistle, for a dollar each way.

Glenn Cox, general manager of Bear & The Butcher on Euclid, has been pushing for a stop in the neighborhood for years. He told a local news crew the ride takes about 20 minutes to the stadium.

"That beats the heck out of the traffic you would deal with," Cox said.

The stop only started running with this season, and it's already changing how people spend their Saturday afternoon. Instead of driving straight to the stadium, some fans are starting their day on Euclid, having a beer or an early plate at Bear & The Butcher, and catching the shuttle from there. Cox put it simply: it gives people a reason to start game day in the neighborhood instead of just passing through it.

What a Saturday on Euclid Actually Looks Like Right Now

If you live in Chevy Chase and you're trying to figure out your weekend, here's the shape of it as of this week.

During daylight hours, Euclid is open and functioning the way it always has. Bear & The Butcher's sidewalk patio and double-decker porch are running their normal hours, with brunch on the weekends. Charlie Brown's, a few doors down and dimly lit with walls lined with old books, is still the same low-key evening spot it's been for decades. The Chevy Chase Inn, Lexington's oldest continuously operating bar, opened in 1933 right after Prohibition ended, and it's still there too. None of that changes.

What changes is after dark. If you're walking home from dinner on a Friday or Saturday night this month, expect equipment and closed lanes between Ashland and High. If you're planning to drive that stretch late, plan around it.

Why This Timing Is More Than a Coincidence Worth Noting

Here's the part that outlasts the paving crew. A shuttle stop is a small thing on paper. But it's the first formal transit connection between Chevy Chase and a UK home game, in a neighborhood that borders campus and has spent every football season since anyone can remember absorbing overflow parking and cut-through traffic without getting anything back for it.

Cox didn't get this stop by accident. He said he'd been asking for one for years, which means the request predates this season by a while. That it landed now, in the same month the street is finally getting its long-overdue repaving, isn't causally connected, but it does mean Euclid Avenue is having two kinds of work done on it at once: infrastructure catching up on the ground, and a transit line finally routing people toward it instead of around it.

Once the paving crew finishes and the cones come down, the closures disappear. The shuttle stop doesn't. That's the piece worth remembering after this particular week of overlap fades: Chevy Chase spent a long time being the neighborhood football fans drove through. This season, for the first time, it's a place some of them are choosing to start from.

The Rest of the Fall Is Still Coming

Home games will keep landing on the calendar through the fall, and each one will bring the same dollar shuttle back to the same stop on Euclid. The paving work has a clear end date. The transit stop doesn't have one attached to it at all, which is usually the tell for whether something is a fixture or a trial.

If you're already living on these blocks, the practical move this month is simple: check the overnight closure windows before you plan a late walk home, and if you're heading to a game, it might be worth starting it a block from your own front door instead of fighting traffic to get there.

If you're weighing whether Chevy Chase fits the way you actually want to live, from morning walks past century-old bungalows to a Saturday that now includes an easy ride to campus, Bradford Queen knows this neighborhood block by block and can talk through what daily life here really looks like, gameday shuttle and all.