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.
King County Metro (Metro) is working with the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) on a plan to improve travel times and reliability for the Route 8. The plan focuses on a series of crucial chokepoints for the route along Denny Way. Metro is utilizing grants from the Federal Transit...
On Friday, the Seattle City Council's transportation committee voted to send the locally preferred alternative of the Madison bus rapid transit (BRT) project to a vote on the full council.
This locally preferred alternative (LPA) incorporates the decisions made by the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) after studying the engineering and geographical...
At approximately 11.00am yesterday, the first trip on the First Hill Streetcar departed its Pioneer Square station at Occidental Avenue & Jackson Street with Mayor Ed Murray, SDOT Director Scott Kubly, City Councilmembers Rob Johnson and Tim Burgess, and a few other Seattle notables on board.
Some of our tweets from yesterday as events were...
Last Monday, one of the first items that our brand new City Council voted on was a holdover matter from the previous council. This was a proposal to cede City right-of-way, otherwise known as a street vacation, on an alley in the Denny Triangle. The specific alley sits between Blanchard and...
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...