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.
Banning auto-oriented businesses to spur walkability: Columbia Heights, Minnesota is trying it.
Frequency Stacks Up: Comparing Houston's new transit network to other cities.
Swept Away: The city of Seattle cleared a record number of homeless camps in 2015.
Breaking Ground: SolTerra's first Seattle building takes shape on E Pike St.
Great Fire: No, not that...
Earlier this month, we reported on an attempt by transit advocates to improve connectivity with Capitol Hill's new light rail station when service begins in March. At the beginning of the month, Metro quietly announced that it was scaling back the changes it had planned to make by keeping...
King County Metro Transit staff are evaluating the ability to still salvage some of the agency's widely panned Capitol Hill restructure. Born out of a larger Link Connections process to integrate local bus service with light rail, Metro watered down several consecutive proposals for improving routes around light rail...
A street improvement project that is about to start construction this winter on Capitol Hill might take a lot of people by surprise, mostly because it's coming in the guise of a park improvement project. But it's been in the works for quite some time.
Summit Slope Park, located on...
It's been a mixed month for the Pronto bike share system. The bike share just celebrated its first year and is getting heavy scrutiny for what some see as under-performing metrics. In late October, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) announced they did not receive the TIGER grant funding that they...
A lot of drama has been brewing over the past few months in Pioneer Square. That's because one developer has proposed a new 11-story building on the edge of the historic district. Wedged between the Alaskan Way Viaduct and S Jackson Street, the current structure falls within the boundary of...
A pretty sizable crowd turned out at City Hall on Wednesday evening to listen to historical minutiae and discussions of structural integrity with a clear goal in mind: putting up a roadblock to the development of one of Belltown's most dense commercial strips.
We covered the building under review on Wednesday: the...
Today the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board will do what it does on a very regular basis: hear arguments regarding a local building or institution, and decide if that building should receive special protection from alteration or destruction. But today's meeting will be very different from a normal one, because...