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 new 520 bridge is now open to cars, but the Seattle side of the project is still a long way from completion. Pedestrians and cyclists have another year to be able to use the bridge to get between Seattle and the Eastside as the pedestrian bridge only extends...
The alternative routes for the missing link of the Burke-Gilman trail through Ballard are now in the public comment and outreach phase.
A lot of people are skeptical of the entire project ever reaching completion after over a decade of Seattle process work, but now that a full Environmental Impact...
Almost all transit advocates are in agreement that the proposal that the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) unveiled in late June for improvements to turn the Eastlake and Roosevelt corridor into a high capacity transit corridor leaves much to be desired.
SDOT was tasked with analyzing the level of investment...
The Pronto bike share system yesterday announced a last minute station move in advance of the long holiday weekend. And they are moving very quickly to make it happen: crews are relocating the station at Dexter Ave and Denny Way today, placing it instead at 5th Ave N and Thomas St....
Last year, when the City of Seattle acquired the dilapidated Sisley properties on NE 65th Street under eminent domain, the drumbeat of neighborhood residents was immediately heard clamoring for the site to be turned into a park. This ignored the fact that property it is zoned for 65-foot buildings,...
The Downtown Residents Alliance (DRA) has filed an appeal on the SEPA Threshold Determination for the implementation of Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) in Downtown Seattle and South Lake Union. The appeal comes on the heels of a public hearing this week by the City Council that sought public comment...
A bit more than a week ago, King County Metro made a quiet revision to the northeastern tail of Route 62. Introduced as part of the major Northeast Seattle bus-to-Link restructure, the route has been plagued with unreliability, overcrowding, and sluggish speed since the day of its launch. Metro had...
Last August, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) experimented with turning one of the city's busiest nightlife corridors into a pedestrian zone: on three consecutive Saturday nights from 8pm to 2am Pike Street was closed to vehicle traffic from Broadway to 12th Avenue. And on two of the three...