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.
King County Metro is back with its next phase of the Lynnwood Link bus restructure process. The proposal focuses on feeding riders to new stations opening as part of the light rail extension and consolidating some redundant service. It also partially reintroduces some past ideas to offer better east-west...
Geography by Geoff gets into the weeds about the effort to bring high-speed rail to Cascadia. Covering the history of rail here in the Upper Left, he makes the point that our very young cities were built around trains. While that deteriorated with the rise of cars and planes,...
Housing abundance is returning as a big policy issue in the 2023 Washington legislative session. On Tuesday, Rep. Jessica Bateman (D-Olympia) filed her eagerly-awaited bill, HB 1110, that would broadly allow missing middle housing in cities throughout the state, with the biggest impact in the major metropolitan areas. The...
Dave Amos of City Beautiful takes on the topic of whether or not on-street parking is really the best use of limited street space.
Amtrak Cascades will be the first Amtrak-branded service in the country to feature new "Airo" trainsets in 2026, which are part of a larger national Amtrak procurement. On Thursday, the Washington State Department of Department (WSDOT) and Amtrak unveiled of a suite of snazzy new trainset renderings and videos...
Third places are a critical part of communities. They provide another space for people to be and mingle. But the suburbs and North American zoning has all but erased them from communities. Not Just Bikes takes a look at these great spaces and how they empower communities.
It's World Cup season! So maybe it's worth talking stock of American soccer (football) culture. Ray Delahanty at CityNerd takes stock of the top 10 best soccer arenas in North American from an urban standpoint. Seattle's Lumen Field ranks in the listings. Delahanty also touches on dishonorable mentions.
The Sound Transit board is asleep at the wheel. Riders can see it clearly when they venture onto Link. Walk into any station and you will find trash collecting on platforms and tracks, in station hallways and escalator grates, and around unmaintained collection bins. Broken escalators and elevators? Check....