Stephen Fesler
Stephen is a professional urban planner in Puget Sound with a passion for sustainable, livable, and diverse cities. He is especially interested in how policies, regulations, and programs can promote positive outcomes for communities. With stints in great cities like Bellingham and Cork, Stephen currently lives in Seattle. He primarily covers land use and transportation issues and has been with The Urbanist since 2014.
Reece Martin at RM Transit dives into the many challenges that American transit is facing right now. Chief among them is the inability to build transit expansions and operate service. Martin offers strategies and ideas to get American transit back on track.
Riders heading between Tacoma, Puyallup, Federal Way, and Seattle will see fewer trips and some route revisions due to an operator shortage starting this spring.
On Thursday, Sound Transit staff detailed plans for service reductions on Pierce Transit-operated ST Express bus service. The agency anticipates a reduction of up to...
Ray Delahanty of CityNerd came home for the holidays and revisited Pike Place Market. In doing so, he highlighted what makes the market so great and authentic, and how it nearly avoided its demise. Delahanty, however, also documented the unbalanced use of Pike Place itself, which is brimming with...
As transit agencies modernize their fare payment systems, digital payment methods are becoming more widespread. Many transit agencies are allowing use of open loop payments with credit and debit cards. But Japan has rapidly built out a very different -- and on the surface complicated -- digital payments system....
Reece Martin at RM Transit explores the history of the tram (streetcar) and its reinvention into as a primary train technology now used throughout the world in urban systems, though often dubbed "light rail" (hello, Link). Martin highlights the pros and cons of widespread use of trams in contemporary...
Snohomish County's bus network will grow, with frequent routes and feeders for light rail.
Community Transit's new long-range plan and adopted 2024 budget offers quite a bit of optimism for the future. Next year promises to delivery the agency's newest Swift bus rapid transit (BRT) line, extend its oldest BRT...
For decades, super-commuting has been a growing trend in many American metropolitan areas. Ray Delahanty of CityNerd digs into the data of where super-commuting is heavily prevalent in regions across the country and offers some commentary on why that might be.
With maintenance base costs rising as much as $1 billion, Tacoma Dome Link could be at risk of further delay.
Sound Transit has unearthed meteoric cost increases for the agency's Operations and Maintenance Facility (OMF) South in Federal Way. Agency staff shared the news on Thursday at a committee meeting,...