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.
Forget your ORCA card? No problem. A new Google Wallet feature allows Puget Sound riders to buy transit fares on their Android or Wear OS devices.
New York City's decongestion pricing program has hit an unexpected roadblock with the state's governor unilaterally imposing an indefinite pause. But decongestion pricing holds a lot of promise for cities across the globe, including in North America. Reece Martin at RM Transit dives into the different ways that decongestion...
Ahead of the full opening of East Link light rail, King County Metro and Sound Transit have queued up a bus restructure for the Eastside, but they have planned insufficient cross-lake service to replace the deleted Route 271. Frequencies crater in the evening, which will leave riders in the lurch.
King County Metro unveiled plans to test out hydrogen-powered buses by 2026. The news comes on the heels of a King County Auditor report casting doubt on Metro's plans to rely heavily on battery buses to meets its goal of a fully electric fleet by 2035.
America's suburbs are a land filled with stroads -- street/road hybrids that are expensive to build and dangerous to use. Some communities want more walkability and bikeability, but making changes to stroads can be highly controversial and difficult to achieve. Dave Amos of City Beautiful picks out some egregious...
South Sounder riders could see more midday and weekday trips under a program reset. Sound Transit staff are recommending postponing pre-pandemic priorities for longer platforms and trains and accelerating investments in more trips and extended span of service.
Route 99, a bus that served the Seattle Waterfront and North Belltown before being cut in 2018, could return in some form. A Metro study presents several new options to restore service.
The world's busiest train station complex is in Tokyo. Dozens of train services converge on Shinjuku Station with intercity, regional, and local service, including numerous subway lines, and the station is served by a large bus exchange. The station complex is massive and is built into a very dense...