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.
Earlier this year, Senator Maria Cantwell announced that the largest grant ever awarded to the state of Washington would be going to a Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) project to grade separate the roadway from the rail track in SoDo at South Lander Street. Connecting 4th Avenue and 1st...
Night owl service in Seattle and places further afield is on the verge of major improvements. In April, we provided a brief on a review of the legacy night owl network, much of which predates the modern King County Metro Transit. The spaghetti routes of the 80 series would go...
With little fanfare, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has quietly delineated some lanes on Fourth Avenue to allow transit to move more freely. Approximately a week ago, a new bus lane was painted leading up to the busy bus stop in front of Westlake Park, where northbound commuter...
One of the main points made by the anti-movement in the lead up to last year's vote on a Seattle-specific transportation levy, the nine-year Levy to Move Seattle, was the idea that promises had been made to Seattle voters in the previous transportation levy (Bridging the Gap) had not been fulfilled....
The saga continues with the Shoreline subarea planning process for the area around the future 145th Street Link Station, which is expected to open in 2023. Shoreline's City Council will meet this evening to consider amendments to the proposed zoning map and development code that would guide growth in...
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...