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.
Here at The Urbanist we thoroughly enjoyed the Seattle Design Festival, which stretched from September 10th to the 23rd. We highlighted women currently working in Seattle to design our urban fabric in a series these past few weeks called Women Shaping Seattle.
We thought we would close our design fest...
Earlier this month at the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board, two employees of the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), Monica DeWald and Chris Svolopoulos, presented the top-level of an intense study into the locations of pedestrian and bicycle collisions in Seattle. SDOT is analyzing collision data on a scale that...
On Wednesday, Pronto Cycle Share announced at the last minute that they were relocating two stations immediately. Word had been filtering down through various sources that the University of Washington light rail station would be getting a station sometime in August, but not expected was the relocation of a...
At a Tuesday press conference at Horizon House on First Hill, Seattle City Councilmembers Tim Burgess and Mike O'Brien announced a proposal to lower speed limits throughout much of the City of Seattle to limits currently found throughout every other city in King County.
Flanked by members of the safe streets...
One of the biggest stories of the year for neighborhood groups has been Ed Murray's dissolving of the District Neighborhood Councils. As we covered before, one of the biggest tasks that the DNCs had on their plates was a front-line say in the distribution of grant money, namely in...
King County Metro Transit is about to unleash the last service change of 2016. Starting in 2017, Metro timetables and service changes will only be implemented twice per year as opposed to the three times per year that we have seen in years past. In general, this season Metro...
This past weekend The Seattle Times broke the news that Motivate, the current operator of Pronto bike share, is right now coming in second place in the City's process for requesting proposals for the expansion of the system, currently scheduled to take place next summer. Coming in first is Bewegen,...
Seattle's Summer Parkways program started quietly in 2015. Modeled on a pretty popular Portland institution, the idea is to close city streets (for the most part) to cars, and open them up to people on foot, bike, rollerblade, skateboard, and to connect parks where families and neighbors can hang...