Hybrids Too Quiet?


Jeff Mapes muses on his Oregonian blog about whether hybrids need to be noisier to be safe.


0 responses to “Hybrids Too Quiet?”

  1. People, we have EYES as well, use them. Trains are loud as hell yet people still get hit by them. Looking and being aware of your surroundings is no excuse to allow yourself to be hit.

    Those that are blind and deaf however I can understand but there isn’t much that can be done about that unfortunately.

  2. Walk anywhere and you’ll be accosted by many motorists speeding by, loud uncapped mufflers roaring, macho raised-truck diesel rattling, crap wagons rusting. The idiots driving these cars are more apt to have an fatal accident than the fuel economy conscious person driving a silent hybrid.

  3. Hybrids and electric cars do make a distinctive sound, but it is nothing like a traditional gasoline engine. It is a high-pitched electronic whine from the inverter. It’s not very loud, but due to it’s distinctiveness, once you recognize it you can hear a hybrid coming from up to a block away. As other vehicles grow quieter over time (one can hope), the issue of relative differences in sound level making out hybrids/electrics will diminish.

    In the mean time, perhaps we can have downloadable/customizable sounds for our vehicles. Personally, I want the Jetsons sound for our hybrid.

  4. Actually, there was a bit on NPR a while ago about how the world has changed for the blind with the advent of cell phones and hybrids.

    Cell phones confuse them because the one way conversation can lead them to believe that someone is talking to them. As in, “How are you?”

    And hybrids were specifically mentioned as being dangerous for the very reason you mention.

  5. “Cell phones confuse them because the one way conversation can lead them to believe that someone is talking to them. As in, “How are you?””

    I really think someone should hand out bluetooth headsets to crazy people that talk to themselves. That way they don’t look crazy, they just look like they are on the phone.

    But back to the topic: Bicycles doesn’t make much noise either, and while they may not do as much damage to a pedestrian as a hybrid car, I still wouldn’t want to get hit by a bicycle doing 20 mph. It seems like the solution to this situation is for drivers/cyclists/etc to watch where they are going and be careful when there might be pedestrians, (be they blind, or children, or just normal people…) There is another big advantage with that: It doesn’t just help the people that are slightly hard of hearing and can’t hear a hybrid, but is also helps the truly deaf people.

  6. I’m deaf… I work on trains, ride transit, and walk downtown… And I’m still alive!

    Like Brian said, we have eyes, use them.

  7. Chris –

    Glad to see you posting here … I really enjoyed your old web site. (If I haven’t said so already.)

    My other half is studying at PCC to become a certified ASL interpreter. (I haven’t learned any yet … when he’s back in the workforce, I should have time for some ASL night classes.)

  8. In response to Wells comments:

    Walk anywhere on shared sidewalks or trails and pedestrians will be accosted by bicyclists whom irresponsibly zoom past without making a sound. Ignoring traffic signals, especially in downtown Portland, bicyclists routinely all but run people down in crosswalks – also without making a sound. It is the bicyclists that are full of it and can not be heard coming when it pertains to not only their own safety, but the safety of everybody else.

    Furthermore, it is not unusual for those same bicyclists who jeopardize pedestrian safety to unmistakably vocalize and shout out plenty of four letter words when hypocritically hollering at motorists whom they also extort as their involuntary financial sugar daddies when it comes to providing and paying for the specialized infrastructure the freeloading bicyclists themselves want, but only give noisy lip service to rather than financial support.

    Additionally, bicyclists demonstrate their own illiteracy placing themselves in harms way with their lack of competency to understand the meaning of the four letter word STOP on red octagon signs, thereby making it harder to stop idiots on soundless bicycles – yet another safety hazard for pedestrians – than it is to stop a rumbling train or even an audible motor vehicle.

  9. Getting back to hybrids, I always find TopGear’s opinions (the video that Garlynn links to) deliciously entertaining, but seldom based in fact. In the Prius review, the reviewer simultaneously scolds the car for getting poor acceleration, and praises the Volkswagen Lupo minicar for getting better MPG. Well, I should hope the Lupo gets better MPG — it’s a much smaller car (40% less passenger space and only 1/3 of the cargo space) — and it takes about 3 seconds longer to reach 60mph than does a Prius.

    The original topic of silent vehicles being a problem for people with limited or no eyesight should be taken seriously. As cars become quieter and more efficient with new technology, including hybrids, battery-electrics, fuel cell-electrics, etc., some combination of enhanced education on how to detect them approaching combined with technological measures (moderate noise makers at low speeds) and improved driver-safety will be required.

  10. Yup, it was maxlightrail.com — Something I started in high school for fun, because I was so fed up with the primitive TriMet website.

    Then, when I went to work at TriMet, they strong-armed me into giving them the domain name. So much for showing some compassion for someone who supports them.

  11. Bob asked: “How did this become another bicycle rant thread?”

    Answer: Only after rants were posted criticizing the motor vehicles some people drive.

    The fact remains, the lack of noise a Prius or electric car makes, especially for sight impaired people, and the lack of bicyclists calling out notification warnings to pedestrians is the same common ground problem/issue.

  12. “The fact remains”

    Terry, it’s your opinion, and you’re more than welcome to it, but I think conversations around here would go a lot better if people didn’t routinely label subjective opinions as facts.

  13. Although I only rode a motorcycle about twice in my life time, I do know a number of people who do or have rode them regularly in the past. The majority, if not all of them, feel the noise a motorcycle makes is an added factor to their safety. Unlike a bicycle, Prius or electric car, hearing the motor running makes both motorists and pedestrians aware of the presence of a person on a motorcycle. In other words, if you can not see a person on a motorcycle, at least you can hear them

  14. I’m with the “stop, look, and listen” crowd. Even if a pedestrian is blind and/or deaf, the motorist has the responsibility to watch out for them. If they don’t want to, then IMO it’s time for that motorist to turn in their drivers’ license.

    All we can do is minimize traffic injuries and fatalities – how many truly “no fault” collisions and such happen that we have no control over?

    Then, when I went to work at TriMet, they strong-armed me into giving them the domain name.
    Chris – I think that’s awesome that you work for TriMet, but I can understand why they’d “request” you to give up the domain name.

    In fact, somewhere online (the place escapes me, and I don’t know that I 100% agree) said the most important thing when registering a domain name these days isn’t the registrar or a privacy protection scheme – it’s the trademark search one performs before registering it in the first place, to make sure nobody can take it away from you.

    Getting back to the topic…
    Unlike a bicycle, Prius or electric car, hearing the motor running makes both motorists and pedestrians aware of the presence of a person on a motorcycle.
    On the same token, were lawsuits filed around the turn from the 19th to the 20th centuries because the “horseless carriages” made different noises than a horse and buggy?

  15. it’s the trademark search one performs before registering it in the first place, to make sure nobody can take it away from you.

    Yes, but can something called “maxlightrail”, a reference to a name used by a public government entity, be considered trademarkable? Especially when the site in question is informative, in the public interest, and clearly relates to the topic? I did not know that Chris got strong-armed at the time, that’s just not acceptable to me from a free-speech perspective. Perhaps more people “get” the idea of personal web pages, enthusiast web pages, and blogging now, but it should be perfectly acceptable for employees of public agencies to maintain personal web sites which may relate in some way to the work they are doing.

    Strangely, I’ve had the opposite experience. I once registered the domain “portlandstreetcar.com” (I still own it) with the intent of starting a web site for transit discussion and streetcar history … but other sites came along (like PT!) that do a great job and I never did anything with the domain. I tried a few times to sell it to the PortlandStreetcar organization for only the costs incurred over the years for registration, transfers, etc., but at the time they were uninterested.

    Now, I do some occasional volunteer webmaster work for them, and I intend to transfer the domain to them soon at no cost … I think they understand better now the need for controlling the .com version of a domain even if they are happy as a .org.

    Do the differences in style represent a tale of two agencies?

    I don’t know, but what I do know is that I’m at a loss to segue this back to a discussion of silent hybrid cars… has anyone been run over by a domain name they didn’t hear coming? :-)

  16. Although I only rode a motorcycle about twice in my life time, I do know a number of people who do or have rode them regularly in the past. The majority, if not all of them, feel the noise a motorcycle makes is an added factor to their safety. Unlike a bicycle, Prius or electric car, hearing the motor running makes both motorists and pedestrians aware of the presence of a person on a motorcycle. In other words, if you can not see a person on a motorcycle, at least you can hear them.
    -Terry Paker

    Anytime anyone starts off saying “I don’t know anything about this but I know people who do” you can pretty much guarantee they are full of it. This is what people say just before they give you their completely unfounded opinion thinly veiled as “fact”.

    I am an avid motorcyclist and have been so for 30 years, since I was 5. I started out a long post detailing my motorcycle credentials and all sorts of other stuff, but deleted it as it would not matter anyway – in the grand scheme of things. Suffice to say, I am much more credible in the motorcycling arena than Mr. Parker…

    So let me simply say this:

    Until people stop pulling out in front of freight trains, there are no blinky lights or annoying sounds that will actually make you safer…

    No matter what Terry’s friends may “feel”.

  17. Tying Chris’s website together and John’s comments about people, (who probably wasn’t deaf and blind,) being stupid even in the presence of flashing lights and bells:

    http://web.archive.org/web/20010410015014/maxtrain.tripod.com/sections/beaverton/bcentral.html

    “Before the Westside MAX line opened, trains were running up and down the line, testing the tracks and the train itself. A man riding his bicycle on Cedar Hills Blvd. disobeyed the warning signals by riding around the lowered crossing arm and was unable to stop in time as the train approached. He slammed onto the side of the train and was knocked down. He was taken to the hospital and died a few days later.”

    (And before Terry says that all bicyclist ride like that, if it had been a car in the same situation, the driver probably would have lived, and as such, it wouldn’t have made the website, although that wouldn’t have made it any less dumb on the driver’s part. And I’ve seen cars go around the gates, (although in both cases they made it across the tracks before the train came and so didn’t get hit,) so trust me, bicyclists don’t have a monopoly on doing stupid things, it is “people” that do stupid things.)

  18. Wow, I haven’t looked at that old site for many years, now it itself is primitive! :) I was a teenager when I gave up the domain name, but held onto http://www.portlandtransit.org, which was the new domain name for this website till I didn’t have time to keep it up. They wanted that one too, so it was then I knew that they were just being arrogant about the domain names. Was it because, at that time, my website was cooler than TriMet’s? :)

    Back to the topic: People nowadays don’t even listen much or pay attention to their surroundings, such as those who listen to their iPods or talk on the cell phone. Take one incident for example, I believe it happened last year in Salem, where a woman talking on a cell phone was hit by an Amtrak Cascades train. Bells are ringin’, horn’s blarin’, and she was still oblivious of her surroundings.

  19. First off, I did not say I did not know anything about motorcycles just because I do not ride them. It seems many who post here who claim to use transit and/or ride bicycles, but do not drive or drive very little also profess to have a wealth of knowledge about driving and motor vehicles. Therefore, if a person is to take John Reinhold’s comments seriously, bicyclists and transit users should not be telling ODOT, PDOT and highway engineers how to design streets, roads and highways for cars and trucks; politicians without environmental engineering degrees should not be devising and passing restrictive environmental laws; and Sam Adams with the aid of want to be transport autocrat Earl Blumenhauer should not be forcefully attempting wedge in streetcars on the motor vehicle paid streets of Portland. An example of the latter was expressed at one of those streetcar propaganda meetings designed to form a vocal choir of support when a regular transit rider stated that express bus service was needed on proposed streetcar routes because the streetcars are too slow to be a viable transit option for him.

  20. when a regular transit rider stated that express bus service was needed on proposed streetcar routes because the streetcars are too slow to be a viable transit option for him.

    I was at that meeting and I think you are mischaracterizing what the person said. You also left out that the commenter prefaced his remarks by stating that he supports the project in general.

  21. Bob,

    I am referring to the statement he made in the small group discussion, not his report after the discussion.

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