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.
Streetfilms highlights how Ghent (Gent), a city in the Flemish north of Belgium, is making streets safe so that kids can walk and bike to school. The city has rolled out bicycle streets and school streets. Ghent was the host city for this year's Velo-city Conference.
Urbanist circles differ in how they see autonomous vehicles, particularly as they move toward wider adoption. Some see them being a tool that builds up urban communities and improves safety while others worry that they could have exactly the opposite effect. Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes falls into...
In North America, modern rail transit usually avoids conventional elevated lines in dense cities and even suburbs. Reece Martin of RMTransit discusses what makes elevated rail so good.
Dave Amos of City Beautiful discusses drive-thru businesses and how they are evolving to create more vehicle throughput. As part of this, Amos discusses the merits of banning them in cities, offering San Luis Obispo as an example.
Public private partnerships have become trendy in infrastructure projects, particularly for transportation. Reece Martin of RMTransit dives into the pros and cons of this strategy as it relates to transit.
Ray Delahanty of CityNerd ranks principal train stations across the United States and Canada for population catchment in proximity to them. Seattle makes the list as one the better-situated stations with King Street Station.
Riding the rails from New York City to Toronto and then eventually onward to London, Ontario, Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes details his journey, highlighting the good and bad of Amtrak and Via Rail service and amenities. One big takeaway from Slaughter is just how slow the trains...
San Francisco has an extravagant transit center delivered just before the pandemic. Right now, it mostly serves a handful of bus routes, but could eventually become a major hub with the arrival of high-speed rail. Dave Amos of City Beautiful dives into what's good and bad about the facility.