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.
Despite the Seattle Department of Transportation having the distinction of being the largest city department, excluding the twin utility behemoths of City Light and Public Utilities, the city council spent relatively little time discussing tweaks to Mayor Durkan's proposed 2019-2020 transportation budget.
The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is now...
The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has been planning a set of repaving projects in the Green Lake area for around two years now. We first wrote about them in April of last year, when the department released initial plans that added bicycle facilities to a few key routes...
This month, the Seattle Police Department released a new tool for Seattle residents to get an idea of how many "calls for service" the department responds to. The Call for Service Dashboard displays a call type for any time period, neighborhood, or precinct.
The dashboard is a good way to visualize...
The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) will pay a contracting firm $455 million to complete the next phase of freeway expansion through central Seattle: a rebuild of SR-520's Montlake interchange. That is $30 million more than the $425 million maximum originally budgeted for the project, which includes a lid...
When the Seattle City Council passed a non-binding resolution that laid out achievable yet fairly ambitious timelines for completing large gaps in our network of safe cycling routes through the center city, one key projects listed was a link between downtown and Southeast Seattle. The council resolution states:
The City...
The proposed budget for the next two years for the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) includes so many different aspects it can be hard to get an understanding of exactly what is proposed, even after a review of the proposed budget documents. We will dig into the issues of...
The mayor's proposed budget, released on Monday, increases the yearly budget for the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) by nearly $130 million for 2019 and $200 million in 2020, directing both unspent funds from previous years and those from new sources like increased fines from red light and school...
This week we learned that the Alaskan Way Viaduct will close permanently on January 11 of next year, with a three-week gap between the closing of one highway and the opening of another, the long-delayed deep bore tunnel connecting SoDo and South Lake Union. We've known this has been...