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 Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is hitting its stride lately on making progress toward its goal of constructing a full bike network composed of 608 miles of bike lanes, off-street trails, and neighborhood greenways. In the past two years or so a number of major bike projects have...
On Tuesday night, Seattle's Office of the Waterfront and the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) presented their concepts for what is being called Pike Pine Renaissance: Act 1. This is an intensive reinvestment in the downtown retail district of Pike and Pine Streets between First Avenue at Pike Place Market...
When Mayor Ed Murray's office announced funds to expand Pronto cycle share would instead be invested in safe streets infrastructure back in January, one of the items earmarked was "accelerating design and outreach for the east/west connections in the Center City bicycle network." Because east-west bike connections have always...
In June, I wrote about how the One Center City stakeholder group was heading toward a downtown where the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel could no longer accommodate buses, but where no additional street space had been allocated on the surface for public transit.
A quick recap: in either March or...
Seattle and Portland have twin stories of fighting urban freeway expansion in the middle of the 20th century. With the defeat of the R.H. Thompson Expressway through the Central District and Montlake by Seattle voters in 1972 and the Mount Hood Freeway along Portland's waterfront and nearby neighborhoods by...
The Seattle Department Transportation is moving forward on making significant changes to NE 65th Street in North Seattle after asking for feedback on several options this spring. We outlined the different options then, and encouraged the department to be bold and follow through on its vision to remake the...
The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is moving ahead quickly with a plan to install protected bike lanes (PBLs) on Pike and Pine Streets in Downtown Seattle by the end of this year. As we have been reporting this summer, the fact of how far up Capitol Hill the...
Last week, Chinese bikeshare company Ofo became the third private bikeshare operator to be given the green light to join the pilot phase of Seattle's new era in bike share, with the Texas-based operator VBikes apparently coming quickly on Ofo's heels in the next week or so. That brings...