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.
Through a mix of highrise, midrise, and missing middle housing, Bellevue's new comprehensive plan would provide capacity for an extra 152,000 homes and 185,000 jobs, potentially allowing the city's population to more than double over the next 20 years.
The state responded to feedback from urbanists and homebuilders by finetuning its draft model code for missing middle housing to be more generous around lot coverage, floor area ratio, setbacks, and design standards.
Sound Transit is weighing parking rate structures as it works to expand its fledgling paid parking program to a projected 21 facilities along Link and Sounder lines by 2026.
Will one more car lane really fix congestion? Jason Slaughter from Not Just Bikes digs into all those promises made by highway departments to...
Merging Everett Transit into Community Transit could take Everett from three 30-minute frequency or better local bus routes to 15. But consolidation is advancing slower than anticipated.
Just shy of its 2019 record, SEA clocked in with 50,887,260 passengers in 2023. That was up 10.7% from 2022.
Ray Delahanty of CityNerd has an updated analysis of potentially high-performing corridors for high-speed rail in North America. Delahanty scores dozens of corridors, but...
Sounder riders want weekend trips and a fuller weekday schedule, an agency report shows, but governing board priorities are holding back near-term potential.