Terrible Loss

Last Friday, I was biking home and I noticed that Soil Conservation Road - which runs through the Goddard Space Flight Center - was closed down, but I had no idea why and assumed it was part of the road construction for the realignment going on. It was only this week that I learned that one of my co-workers, Dr. Yoram Kaufman was hit while riding his bike just north of the guard gates. He was in a coma most of the week and on Wednesday he passed away.

Yoram was a brilliant senior scientist and a highly regarded and well-liked member of the Earth-Sun Exploration Division. A Senior Fellow, Yoram was the Project Scientist for Terra through its launch, worked on MODIS and other earth science projects, and developed methods for remote sensing of fires and aerosols.   He wrote or co-authored over 170 scientific papers.

His family set up a website for those concerned about his state and they have an accident description. The only real description of the accident comes from the driver who claims it wasn't her fault, but for an experienced cyclist - the accident sounds unusual.

According to the driver, as she moved her vehicle across the double yellow line to get around Dad, he turned his head, noticed the oncoming vehicle, was startled, and collided with it.

Soil Conservation Road is a two lane road with about 6 inches of shoulder. Drivers drive at high speed and at rush hour it can be very crowded. Back when NASA was working on it's facilities master plan (the report itself is not online - or at least I couldn't find it) I remember going to one of the meetings and listening to them talk about the plan. Right now Goddard has 97 parking spaces for every 100 employees. They have a mandate to get that down to 90. They were talking about how difficult it would be to get to 90. Someone suggested encouraging cycling. They complained that since Goddard was bordered on the north by the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center it would be difficult to get to 90, since few people would bike from the north. Someone pointed out that if Soil Conservation road had wider shoulders people would. The designer's response (this is all from memory from year's ago - so I want to point out I could be wrong) was basically that the county only required 1-foot shoulders and so that's what they would provide. With other roads they held the same “only what the county requires" attitude. So they were only going to do the minimum.

I'm not saying that this contributed to the accident last Friday, construction is just now going on so any changes made then would not be implemented yet, but I doubt the accident would have happened had there been wider shoulders (and I believe the road is a county designated bike route - so one can't say he shouldn't have been there).

If Goddard continues the realignment without improving cycling facilities, but expects to get 10% of employees out of their cars then I fear this is only going to be the first such accident.