EV too Quiet to be PC!
There’s more buzz about how to protect visually impaired pedestrians from noiseless vehicles.
The renewed interest was touched off Wednesday, April 9, in Congress when Reps. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., and Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., introduced a bill they say is intended to protect blind people and other pedestrians from silent vehicles. The Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2008 would require the Department of Transportation to conduct a two-year study and come up with safety standards that automakers would need to implement.
If you have driven electric vehicles or gasoline-electric hybrids, you know why it’s an issue. You can’t hear them. And it’s not just blind people. There have been times when I’ve been behind the wheel of a hybrid that I startled the heck out of other, sighted drivers, particularly in parking lots and at stoplights.
(Disclosure: OK, I admit it; a couple of times I did it on purpose.)
The National Federation of the Blind is driving the silent-vehicle issue with legislators and elsewhere. A year ago, the federation approached SAE International with the group’s concerns.
(Disclosure: I’m a member of SAE International.)
Report expected
The day the bill was introduced, SAE sent a media advisory to let us know that the engineering group already is hard at work on the matter. According to the SAE backgrounder, the group has three task forces studying the various issues, and the group expects to have a technical report by year end that will include an evaluation of ” potential countermeasures.”
Not long after the SAE memo landed in my e-mail, I got a call from a friend who is visually impaired. He wanted me to know how important the issue is.
I assured him I did and told him the story about startling other drivers.
The next day, I got an e-mail from a reader who works for a supplier in the sound-deadening business and who had a little different take.
While expressing concern for the blind, the reader said creating laws governing a minimum level of sound would be absurd and likened mandating a noise device for cars to the old Mattel V-rroom toy motors that made bicycles sound like motorcycles.
I had to admit there would be a certain irony in forcing vehicles to be louder after decades of noise abatement regulations and standards.
Cell phone devices
But my visually impaired friend suggests a less intrusive solution: Installing transponders that could be heard by specially programmed cell phones to alert pedestrians. Everyone carries a cell phone these days, he reasons.
It might work for my friend, who is a habitual early adopter of communications technology. He may have been the first person I knew who had a cell phone, one of the early Motorola units that looked more like the PRC-25 backpack radios used in Vietnam than the RAZRs that kids carry today.
But I’m not convinced that the ideal solution would be to add cost, complexity and the need for visually impaired pedestrians to obtain — and remember to carry – a special device.
It’s clear why the visually impaired want louder cars. If they can hear danger coming, they don’t need to rely on drivers to see and avoid them. It’s a question of self-reliance and self-preservation.
No matter what SAE or DOT recommends, this still is going to be a thorny issue that pits cost and the rights of the many against the rights of the few.
Via Automotive News