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Friday, May 31, 2002 - 5:05 p.m. Pacific
Getting around is getting harder. More people, more cars, same roads. Transportation has consumed the Legislature for years, taken over the talk of the town and made itself one of the most important issues in the Puget Sound area.
The Seattle Times is committing a team of reporters and editors to the topic. In the coming months, we'll provide information on transportation challenges, provide a forum for readers to share concerns and propose solutions, and offer practical advice on getting around.
Here are the members of the team:
Eric Pryne, a Seattle native, remembers when there was no Interstate 5. He came to The Times in 1976, spent a total of 10 years writing about environmental issues, and did a three-year stint as the newspaper's correspondent in Washington, D.C. He was lead reporter for The Times' "Front Porch Forum" project, which examined growth and transportation issues in the late 1990s. In 1999-2000 Pryne was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where he explored the pros and cons of growth and wasn't required to go anywhere on a freeway at rush hour. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Eric will write about efforts to solve transportation problems and the relationship between growth and transportation.
Mike Lindblom, 39, was born in Seattle three months after the original Monorail opened. He worked at the Tri-City Herald and then The Daily News of Longview, where he wrote about a 1993 freight-train wreck that killed five crewmen and exposed a lack of safety alarms in the locomotives. Since joining the Times in 1997, he has worked in the Eastside bureau covering education, growth, goose overpopulation, Bellevue and the 2000 Census. He will be covering transportation projects in the making: Sound Transit, the proposed monorail and the replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
Susan Gilmore has been a journalist for 30 years, 23 years at The Seattle Times. Previously she worked at newspapers in Alaska, and she has covered "pretty much everything except business and education," with her longest stint in politics. She was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. A University of Washington graduate, she remembers writing a research paper on whether or not to build the Thompson Expressway. She will cover transportation at the ground level, writing about traffic, ferries, buses and how we use them to get around. Gilmore, with the other transportation reporters, will write a weekly column to help commuters.
Andrew Garber has 20 years of experience as a reporter, working for newspapers in Florida, Idaho and Maine before joining The Seattle Times about two years ago as a transportation reporter. Garber wrote extensively about Sound Transit's light-rail project going $1 billion over budget. He moved from Kirkland in December to join The Times' state government team in Olympia and his average round-trip commute dropped 80 percent, from 90 mintues to 20 minutes. He is covering the Referendum 51 campaign, which would increase gas taxes by 9 cents a gallon to help pay for transportation projects.
Editor for the transportation team will be John B. Saul, who has been at The Times for 25 years. He has held several editing positions at the paper and previously worked at The Associated Press, The Columbian in Vancouver and the Eastside Journal. When he moved to Seattle in 1976, the "bridges to nowhere" still went nowhere. Contact him for general questions about the team or transportation issues.
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