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.
In 2015, over 35,000 people in the US were killed on our nation's roadways. This was the largest percentage increase over the previous year in more than fifty years. Every single day, more than one hundred lives were lost, scattered across our sprawling country in countless, disparate tragedies.
The trend...
When the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) announced the end of an eight-year study on traffic collision data, it had a very comprehensive set of data on where collisions took place, what modes were involved, and how the collisions occurred. The big question was: how would the department begin...
Seattle is now more than a year into a city-declared state of emergency around the issue of homelessness. On November 2, 2015, the office of mayor Ed Murray announced the emergency declaration, as well as a one-time allocation of $5 million dollars to fund 100 new shelter beds as...
Often when an idea comes along that the urban planning world finds intriguing, there's a race for other cities to try out that idea. One such idea that has been getting a lot of press lately is the Barcelona "superilles". In English, this word is being translated as "superblock"...
On Monday, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) released the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the new, post-viaduct Alaskan Way and accompanying promenade along the waterfront. It shows us our future along the waterfront: a massive roadway, nine lanes in parts, separating our city from its waterfront in...
After going through a request for proposals process to determine which firm will handle the expansion of bikeshare in Seattle scheduled for Summer of 2017, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has announced that the preferred firm right now is the Quebec-based Bewegen.
SDOT chose Bewegen over the current bikeshare operator Motivate...
We have been covering the selection process all year long for the beefy neighborhood projects that are funded through the Neighborhood Street Fund program, a collaboration between the Department of Neighborhoods' District Neighborhood Councils and the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT).
This year, with Seattle's new transportation levy providing most...
At an open house Monday night, the Seattle Department of Transportation unveiled a number of options for street designs on Northeast Seattle arterials that are scheduled to be repaved in the next few years. These repavings are prime opportunities to get street improvements and rechannelizations completed relatively quickly: the streets...