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.
People for Bikes recently announced the results of their nationwide review of all of the new bike infrastructure that opened in 2016, with the top award going to a long-awaited Seattle project: the Westlake Avenue cycletrack. The Westlake cycletrack is a key piece of Seattle's bike network that should...
Walking in Seattle is the fastest-growing commute method citywide right now. As I will take every chance I can get to mention, Josh Feit at Publicola was the first to report that the Seattle Department of Transportation's commute data shows that people commuting by foot grew by a whopping 50%...
In 2011, the Seattle City Council reached what was, at the time, perceived as a compromise on height limits in Pioneer Square. Councilmember Tim Burgess, who on Monday announced his retirement from the city council after becoming its elder statesman, at the time talked about a Solomonian compromise between...
Sound Transit's Capitol Hill station marks a crucial turning point for the agency. The fruit of years of advocates pressing the agency to more robustly pursue affordable housing around its stations through the land that it has been purchasing through eminent domain, the station will be setting the model...
Last week the city council of Portland, Oregon signed on to the Vision Zero action plan that has been developed by the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) as part of its proposal to eliminate serious deaths and injuries on city streets by 2025, a full five years sooner than Seattle's...
Last Monday the Seattle City Council approved its budget for the next two years, 2017-2018. This year's budget season received added scrutiny due to some highly visible proposals that were proposed by the councilmembers, some of which made it into the final passed budget. Here are some of the...
One morning in early May of this year, shortly before leaving for work, I checked my Twitter account and learned that police activity had closed a street a few blocks from my office near Tillicum Place in north Belltown. A man had been killed by a car, the tweet...
Seattle has been widely successful in getting developers to build ground floor retail as part of residential developments since the 1990s. Land use regulations in many places have required it on designated pedestrian streets for years. Retail districts are most successful when people are encouraged to circulate through many different establishments...