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.
While Lynnwood Link is slated to get its badly needed $100 million from Congress in the latest appropriation from D.C., Seattle's RapidRide projects wait on the Feds and are just as essential in serving the city's surging transit needs. Roosevelt RapidRide is one of the corridors that have submitted...
The Seattle Department of Neighborhoods has wrapped up a second year of its citywide participatory voting program, Your Voice Your Choice (YVYC), to select projects with a street or park focus to receive community funding. Formerly the funding had been allocated by the department's District Neighborhood Councils under a...
Around Seattle, a slate of street improvements that were approved nearly two years ago, in October of 2016, are being constructed. On Capitol Hill, street calming and new crosswalks are being added to E John St and E Thomas St. In West Seattle, a new bike signal will allow...
Over the weekend, Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) crews were busy marking twelve blocks of 3rd Avenue "bus only" and adding signs up and down the corridor alerting drivers not to enter between the hours of 6am and 7pm any day of the week. These changes were originally planned...
What does Mayor Jenny Durkan's approach to Vision Zero policy look like? After nine months in office, one thing that appears to be true is that the issue is not a high priority one on the seventh floor of City Hall. When the city council unanimously passed a resolution...
After delays and setbacks in recent years held Seattle back from having a fully connected network of safe bicycle facilities downtown, the Seattle City Council is preparing to pass a resolution laying out exactly what segments of should be constructed to complete the network and when they should be...
While the city awaits Mayor Jenny Durkan's decision on the fate of the Center City Connector, scores of business owners, individuals, and organizations have waited for weeks to speak face-to-face with her about the project. On June 19th, the coalition sent a letter to the mayor outlining why the she...
On a Thursday evening in early June, at the top floor of King County Metro Transit's building on South Jackson Street, the One Center City advisory group quietly met after a nine-month hiatus. Notice for the meeting had only been posted to the obscure website for One Center City...