A few weeks after 25-year-old Aron Sobel was killed 10 years ago in a bus crash in Turkey, the Turkish government sent his mother, Rochelle Sobel, a package of his effects. Among them was Aron Sobel’s camera, and inside the camera was undeveloped film of Aron’s final days. In the last picture of Aron alive, he is holding a copy of “Let’s Go Turkey and Greece,” the iconic travel guide of the younger set.
At that time, “Let’s Go” warned travelers of malaria and snakebites and political unrest. Rarely did it mention the single biggest killer of healthy Americans traveling abroad: road crashes.
Ten years later, Rochelle Sobel has not only changed the face of travel guides — “Let’s Go,” “Lonely Planet” and their counterparts now all deal with road safety concerns — but also of international politics. When the World Health Organization released a report last year on global road crashes, it was largely the result of work by Rochelle Sobel’s organization, the Association for Safe International Road Travel (ASIRT).
Next week, ASIRT will mark it’s 10th anniversary with a reception and dinner at Strathmore Mansion honoring former Turkish Ambassador and senior State Department official W. Robert Pearson, Mothers Against Drunk Driving CEO Chuck Hurley and two ASIRT directors, H. Randall Morgan Jr. and Laurie Wexler.
ARON SOBEL grew up in Potomac and attended Jewish Day School, where Rochelle Sobel is a teacher. He went to the University of Maryland as an undergraduate and medical student and had completed his final rotation abroad in Israel when he went to Turkey and Greece for a week-long vacation before returning home. He died May 3, 1995, just days before he was to return to the United States and graduate from medical school.
According to the Turkish police report Rochelle Sobel later received, the bus driver was speeding down the wrong lane of a narrow, deteriorated, two-lane highway late at night. He had driven past the point of exhaustion and the bus went over the edge of the winding road, plunging into a ravine and killing 24 passengers.
Rochelle Sobel said that before Aron’s death, she was one of the millions of American travelers who worry about things like terrorism and disease but never considered road safety when traveling abroad.
“I started trying to find out, well, how many Americans die abroad in road crashes,” Rochelle Sobel said. “We found out that over 1 million die every year and 50 million are injured. And it’s going to double in the next few years unless something happens.”
On July 18, 1995, Rochelle Sobel and friends and family held a candlelight vigil for Aron outside the Turkish embassy in Washington. The Turkish officials came to talk to Sobel and within weeks, ASIRT was born.
“NOT JUST ANYBODY would have taken this tragedy and turned it in to something some positive,” said Cathy Silberman, executive director of ASIRT. “She’s almost like a national heroine there because you know she could have gone in there and said you’re a lousy country, look how terrible you are, look what you did to my son, but she sort of turned it around and said let’s make it better so we can save other lives.”
The organization, still based out of Sobel’s Potomac home, now works both at home and abroad, promoting global road safety through legislative advocacy, partnerships with local non-governmental organizations, and relationships with U.S. corporations and study-abroad programs that send citizens to foreign countries.
Marc Grossman was ambassador to Turkey when Aron Sobel was killed. “Some said it could not be done, that no one would care, that organizations and governments were too busy, too feeble or too uncaring,” Grossman said of ASIRT’s work in a written statement. “But those who doubted had not yet met Rochelle Sobel.”
The group's work has focused largely on Turkey, where Aron was killed, Kenya, and roughly a dozen other developing countries, although it has published road travel reports for more than 50.
“... Developing countries are getting more and more motorized but the infrastructure and the driving culture doesn’t help the situation. They don’t know yet how to drive, roads are poor, people speed, people don’t wear seatbelts, there’s no regard for pedestrians, people don’t wear helmets,” Sobel said. “The return on small investments in road safety is enormous. That’s what we’re telling people.”
Sobel recalled that the United States drastically reduced road fatalities with the introduction of seat belts and other safety equipment and practices now taken for granted.
“What we say is look, we want to save you those years where our death rate was so high because it’s as if we’ve already got the injection, the inoculation. So please let us help you with it, let us give it to you so you can not go through all these growing pains that we had to go through,” she said.
Sobel quickly dismissed the contention that infrastructure improvements and national safety campaigns might be too costly for developing countries. With road deaths and injuries costing those countries 3 percent of their gross domestic product annually, road safety efforts make economic sense as well as moral sense.
ASIRT 10th ANNIVERSARY DINNER
The Association for Safe International Road Travel will hold its 10th Anniversary Dinner and Reception at Strathmore Mansion and Music Center June 9. The dinner and program will begin at 6:30 p.m. There will be a raffle and an ad journal, the ASIRT Travel Companion. A special pre-dinner Ambassador’s Reception will begin at 6 p.m. ASIRT’s annual dinner will honor Ambassador W. Robert Pearson, Director General and Director of Human Resources for the Foreign Service; Chuck Hurley, CEO, MADD (Mother’s Against Drunk Driving); and ASIRT board members Laurie Wexler and Randy Morgan. The pre-dinner Ambassador’s Reception will feature Pearson, who will speak on “Expanded Challenges for Diplomacy.”
Tickets for the dinner are $150 and tickets for the dinner and ambassador’s reception are $200. Raffle tickets are $25.
For more information call 301-983-5252 or visit www.asirt.org.