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.
Beginning shortly after New Year's Day, the Seattle Department of Transportation will begin working on a new segment of the Center City Bike Network, built upon a segment of bike lane already in place on Amazon's campus. As early as January 2nd, work will begin to install a southbound...
The Seattle Department of Transportation earlier this month released its 2017 traffic report, which finalizes a year's worth of data from 2016 to provide a picture that can be comparable to previous years of data. One of the most notable conclusions from the report is that SDOT's estimates for...
The Seattle Department of Transportation's right-of-way improvement manual just got a big upgrade, and it's big news for street design nerds. The new version, called Street Illustrated, is exactly what the name implies: a manual that shows, rather than tells, what the guidelines for street design call for in...
On November 26th, volunteers with Seattle's most active street safety organization, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, criss-crossed the city, stopping at sites along our streets where collisions within the past year had led to someone's death. Somberly they placed white silhouettes marking the spots and bearing the age of the person...
As soon as Seattle's SR-99 tunnel opens in 2019, work will begin to de-highway-ify Aurora Ave N south of the tunnel portal in South Lake Union, converting it from a heavily used arterial with no cross-traffic at the side streets to a neighborhood street with traffic lights at every...
Seattle privately-run bikeshare pilot is widely heralded: it's cheaper, shinier, and more widespread and flexible. There's just one catch. Besides being better than Pronto Cycle Share was, private bikeshare hasn't accomplished much yet.
After pulling the plug on Pronto Cycle Share in the midst of a planned reboot as a completely city-managed...
In April, I wrote about the failure to turn Seattle's high tech corridor in North Downtown away from being a car-centric office park and into a neighborhood for people. South Lake Union is for cars, I wrote then. This summer, Mark Ostrow demonstrated exactly how some of the investments in...
One of the biggest questions swirling around the new $1.6 billion expansion of the Washington State Convention center--apart from whether it will actually get used, and who benefits from it--is how much the developer, Pine Street Group, will have to compensate the citizens of Seattle in exchange for permanent...