[bartread]

This is one of the most retrograde pieces of legislative nonsense imaginable.

Just when significantly cutting noise pollution from motor vehicles in urban areas is finally within our grasp we toss it away by forcing them to make stupid and annoying UFO noises on the grounds of nebulous safety concerns.

There were any number of ways of solving this that would have been less annoying and better for peoples' health[0].

For one thing, most people are able to use their eyes and will learn soon enough that EVs don't make much noise at low speeds and will keep an eye out for them. How do I know this? I live in Cambridge, UK, which is brimming with cyclists. They don't make much noise either, but you learn to look out for them (and very quickly too).

And for those who are partially sighted or blind some sort of warning device + appropriate signal could no doubt have been engineered and legislated.

But, no, we've gone for stupid noises instead.

[0] We now, of course, know that noise pollution does in fact cause health issues and, I'd argue, these outweigh the safety argument.

[discreteevent]

I don't think you would make this argument if you had seen up close the damage a car can do to a pedestrian. The problem isn't noise. It's that there are two ton vehicles traveling close to unprotected people. Anything that can mitigate that is a good thing. The argument about noise pollution causing health issues is ridiculous in comparison.

I've heard that some EV drivers turn off the sound because it annoys them. They are potentially setting themselves up for a lifetime of remorse.

[Rufbdbskrufb473]

It's not ridiculous. You need to consider the numbers involved. If one extra person breaks his leg because he didn't look and see the quiet car before crossing the street, that's a fair trade off for reducing the noise pollution for a million people.

[cjbgkagh]

Noise pollution for me is dominated by barking dogs, engine braking, and motorbikes. Making very quite cars less quiet would be comparatively trivial.

[helmholtz]

Cars are 'less noisy' vs all the things that you mentioned simply because they are omnipresent. They wear you down, grind away at your tranquility, but because they're always there, they do so without you even noticing. A peaceful evening walk is made wearisome by the constant trickle of cars intruding into your hearing. Particularly so in the USA, because the cars there (just like everything else) are vast. Car use in city is a blot on humanity. I wish they would all just go away and be saved for the weekend road trip, or moving house, but not for groceries or commuting.

[cjbgkagh]

I have hyperacusis (hypersensitive to noise) and insomnia and I wish all noisy things would go away. I’m one of those people who’s health is severely impacted by noise and I spend a lot of money trying to get away from it. I know that most people don’t have these conditions so they don’t understand how inconsiderate they’re being. It is unrealistic of me to expect others to be more accommodating. If anything people are getting much noisier. I would be exceedingly happy to live in a place where electric cars are the biggest generators of noise pollution. I’ve lived in Europe in walkable cities with little car traffic and it’s worse with drunk revealers singing at the top of their lungs at all hours, parties going until late at night and barking dogs in the early morning. Makes me pine for a HOA controlled gated city suburbia with strict noise controls. Most traffic noise, and especially electric car noise, can be covered up by a noise generator. One place I lived installed an artwork that lit up to different levels depending on the noise pollution, instead of encourage people to be quieter it did the opposite as they competed on who could make the most noise.

[saiya-jin]

You are utterly overblowing one part (noise pollution from EVs, which is really just a bit louder humm, for whatever personal reasons you have) and ignoring the additional, massive and instant benefits of actually saving lives. I definitely appreciate the added noise, so do my small kids, and they don't have to learn this from having school mate killed by ultra quiet car, same for ie elderly. Not living on this planet alone, did you notice?

Noise pollution from ie ambulance, sports car, basically any motorbike, old car, trucks and so on is much much bigger. Where is your outrage for those?

And no, noise pollution from these cars discussed is not causing massive health issues that outweigh people getting maimed and killed by them, thats just your personal preferences (like not owning a car because you are young without a family etc) you would like to push on whole society for whatever personal reasons.

[singleshot_]

Making life much more annoying at the benefit of a few kids getting run over is not automatically a great tradeoff. As a society, we should be thinking harder about these sorts of conundrums. No one wants to get run over and yeah it's a bad outcome, but how far would you go? How many times do you have to get woken up by an Amber alert before you turn it off?

Maybe his personal reason is that he's absolutely capable of getting out of the way of a car, but he doesn't like noise. That's a reasonable preference. If you absolutely can't guarantee that a kid ends up under a car without the noise, fine, but I doubt that's true.

Sure, we dont live on this planet alone, but that seems like it's more justification for not intentionally making our shared space miserable, not less.

[mordae]

From what I've heard, EVs are about as noisy as regular cars at speeds relevant to the noise pollution issue.

Check out: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=815

[MontyCarloHall]

>And for those who are partially sighted or blind some sort of warning device + appropriate signal could no doubt have been engineered and legislated.

What do you have in mind? I can’t think of anything as effective as sound—the blind person needs no special hardware to perceive it, and it can be easily spatially localized.