Ryan Packer
Ryan Packer has been writing for The Urbanist since 2015, and currently reports full-time as Contributing Editor. Their beats are transportation, land use, public space, traffic safety, and obscure community meetings. Packer has also reported for other regional outlets including Capitol Hill Seattle, BikePortland, Seattle Met, and PubliCola. They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
Washington State's transportation chief Roger Millar is out after eight years, as Governor-elect Bob Ferguson prepares to take office. Widely recognized as a leader in progressive transportation policy, Millar will be tough to replace.
With $15 million in federal funds in hand, accessibility upgrades are moving forward for the Seattle Center monorail station. Take a look at the preferred concept.
Big changes are coming to the Washington State Senate in 2025, including the elevation of incoming Senator Jessica Bateman to a high profile post as head of the Housing Committee, a symbol of the continued salience of the issue.
King County Metro is testing out on-board cameras that capture license plates in order to issue citations for violations of bus only lanes. It's the first transit agency in Washington to try out this technology.
Two bathrooms at King County Metro transit centers will keep operating into 2025 thanks to a new budget allocation. But whether the County can sustain and grow its public restroom program in the long-term is another question.
A budget amendment put forward by Council President Nelson asks for information on how and when the city creates priority space for buses, citing opposition to Route 40. At a meeting last week, Nelson suggested that if she had wanted to kill a controversial project she already could have done it.
By a 5-3 vote last week, the Seattle City Council said it wasn't ready to plan for the decommissioning of the South Lake Union Streetcar. But unifying the city's two streetcar lines into one system seems less likely than ever before.
A third-party consultant told the Sound Transit board this week that the Fourth Avenue station option in Chinatown is "not reasonably constructible," due to lengthy construction timelines and a laundry list of risks that come with construction next to a BNSF rail line.