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.
The busiest City-controlled corridor for vehicle traffic in Seattle is the West Seattle bridge, which carried over 108,000 cars on an average day in 2016. For people on bikes, the busiest place in the city is the Fremont bridge, which saw an average of 2,600 cyclists per day that...
Joshua Karl Reynolds was walking on the shoulder of Birch Bay Lynden road near Blaine, Washington on a Saturday evening last May when he was struck and killed by the passenger-side mirror of a passing truck. The driver of the truck left the scene and turned himself in to...
$96 million dollars could be the new overall budget cap for all seven corridors that the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) promised voters it would upgrade to prioritize transit, according to the newly released findings from the reassessment of the nine-year Move Seattle levy that has been taking place...
Seattle's system of sidewalks are worth an estimated $5.6 billion dollars, making them an asset with few equals on the city's ledgers. But Seattle has neglected its sidewalks for decades and decades, both in terms of expansion and maintenance. The lack of sidewalks in vast swaths of the city--particularly...
On Monday, the Seattle City Council approved the street and alley vacations requested by the Washington State Convention Center (WSCC) for its forthcoming $1.7 billion expansion. In the process, they accepted largest public benefits package in Seattle history, and cleared a key hurdle toward allowing the project to start...
While we wait for the full results of the Durkan administration's reassessment of spending and deliverables in Seattle's nine-year Move Seattle transportation levy, details are starting to emerge on where exactly we are in certain programs. Last Wednesday, Interim Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) Director Goran Sparrman and key...
Wednesday evening, crews painted and opened the final segment of the long-awaited extension of downtown Seattle's signature bike thoroughfare. With the opening of the concrete-protected bike lane through 2nd Avenue and Stewart Street, a harrowing detour on what has been a fully-functioning bikeway for a few months now is...
After years of disruption on 23rd Avenue through the Central Area, Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is finally wrapping up construction on the street and moving on to the second phase of the project in Leschi. The corridor improvements themselves have been transformative by creating a safer, multi-modal street....