While riding her bike after school, 11-year-old Summer Lin was killed on Oct. 9 by a Montgomery County school bus taking students home from Earle B. Wood Middle School in Aspen Hill, Maryland, where Lim was a student. This event has caused the county to reexamine the intersection where Lin was killed, adding a stop sign to enhance safety for pedestrians.
Rochelle Sobel, fourth grade Judaic studies teacher at the Lower School and president and founder of the Association for Safe International Road Travel (ASIRT), is a strong advocate for road safety. Sobel founded ASIRT in 1995 in response to her son alumnus Aron Sobel’s (87’) death at the age of 25 in a bus crash in Turkey. This event motivated Sobel to work to prevent similar crashes and try to save lives.
“I started to ask myself, what could I have done to prevent such a thing? What could anybody do? What can we do to prevent other families from going through this horrendous tragedy that we went through?” Sobel said.
Sobel believes there are major ongoing issues when it comes to school bus safety, including lack of seatbelts, driver blind spots, visibility issues and speeding in school zones. Sobel calls for lowering speed limits near schools from 25 to 20 miles per hour, conducting walkability studies to assess pedestrian safety, more functional traffic cameras and stop signs and better bus safety technology, such as sensors that detect pedestrians.
At JDS, safety measures have been evaluated and implemented to ensure maximum safety for students that take the school bus, according to Manager of Auxiliary Services Liz Gross. Gross believes community awareness can help improve safety measures to prevent tragedies like this
Sobel’s organization is dedicated to advocating for road safety in the US and abroad. It works to influence policy change and government action, provide travel safety information for international travelers and raise awareness about preventable road deaths. According to Sobel, the organization focuses on prevention, not reaction, meaning that it aims to stop crashes before they happen by improving safety measures and education.
Through her organization, Sobel has produced detailed safety reports for nearly 100 countries, helped found the Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety and advocated for creation of the Global Road Safety Caucus in Congress. ASIRT has also helped install streetlights, sidewalks and other safety infrastructure in Maryland.
“Unfortunately, so often it takes a tragedy to prevent something, and that’s one of our ongoing themes,” Sobel said. “We don’t know the cure for so many things, so many illnesses, so many diseases. Road crashes are a public health issue, and we know the cure. We know exactly the kinds of interventions that would dramatically reduce deaths, and we should be instituting them.”
Over 200 JDS students use the bus or shuttle system, according to Gross. There are four bus routes, each designed collaboratively with families and bus companies to maximize safety and convenience. JDS works with Exquisite Transportation, a company with 35 years of experience, to hire licensed and trained bus drivers.
While Gross believes a good way to prevent bus accidents is qualified bus drivers, Ariel Wolf, Chairman of the Autonomous and Connected Mobility Group at Venable LLP and parent to senior Eliana Wolf and freshman Lirone Wolf, believes the solution is automated vehicles. 94% of automotive related deaths are due to human error and that could be caused by lack of attention, intoxication, fatigue, drugs and distraction, according to Wolf.
“Dealing with the aspect of human impairment and removing that from the equation and replacing it with what’s called an automated driving system, that is going to help improve safety,” Wolf said.
Wolf believes autonomous technology could eventually apply to buses, but they will likely be among the last vehicles to become self-driving. However, since autonomous vehicles are not immediately becoming mainstream, safe driving must be the priority, according to Wolf.
Similarly to Wolf, Sobel believes that road safety is everyone’s responsibility: pedestrians, drivers and passengers alike. Safety is the number one priority, and everyone must do their part to protect lives on the road, according to Sobel.
“You’ve got to be sure that the sidewalks are there, the roads that they need to cross are safe and the public transport they take is safe,” Sobel said. “I mean, all of these things are key. So to be in that position for [ASIRT] is really pikuach nefesh for us, it is a way of saving the world.”
