Banjo Jones notes that Houston Press reporter Todd Spivak was recently recognized by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) for his investigative work on METRO.
Here’s the mention from IRE’s website:
Todd Spivak of the Houston Press for “Run Over by Metro.” This alternative weekly’s investigation into the Metropolitan Transit Authority in Houston looked at fatalities and serious injuries caused by the public bus system. It found that the agency rejected the safety recommendations of its own investigators, hounded victims to settle accidents and misrepresented its accident statistics.
Spivak’s 2006 article is available here. Here’s a quick excerpt:
The Houston Press has spent the last four months independently investigating Metro’s bus operations. It took an appeal to the Attorney General of Texas’s Open Records Division to open up Metro’s records. In examining thousands of public documents and interviewing more than a dozen recent survivors of Metro accidents and families whose relatives were killed by Metro buses, the Press found repeated instances of the following:
