We all know technology can kill us — but we must learn to leave behind our current, menacing, totems if we ever hope to stretch into the future of us to create a cleaner and quieter world. There is an idiotic move afoot to make electric cars as noisy as their prehistoric gas-guzzling ancestors.

Here’s the idea of the ridiculous “added sound” mandate for these naturally quiet cars:

A proposed law, HR 5734, mandates noise making generators on quiet vehicles.

The National Federation for the Blind has been lobbying congress for noise making generators on hybrid-electric cars, claiming that the noise will allow their members to better hear them. If passed, automakers will be mandated to add external speakers on all hybrid vehicles.

Noise pollution is just as damaging as smog and other smoky emissions and to artificially add noise to something naturally quiet is just what one would expect from a disturbing and meaningless government intervention.

When mechanical horsepower replaced the horse and buggy — did the Blind want to add the sound of horse hooves on cobblestones to the pesky new automobiles?

No.

The Blind learned to adapt to the new essence of the horseless carriage by adjusting their expectation and remaking their internal warning system.

Electric cars should have a silent, progressively vibrating, signal that will shake a wristwatch that the Blind will wear to help alert them to the oncoming danger of an approaching car.

There are many Deaf-Blind people right now that manage to cross streets just fine without being able to “hear” a car engine approaching.

With the urgent — and necessary — rise of the silent car, we will have to heighten our eyes and not rely so much on lazy hearing and the confounding mysteries of Doppler sound waves bouncing to-and-fro that ruin our quiet future with the expectation that transportation must always make noise — even added, artificial noise — to have a place in the streets while colding our hearts and mangling our ears.

3 Comments

  1. ANNE – I live and teach on the upper West Coast of the United States. My interests are Philosophy, English, and Social Communication.
    ANNE says:

    This is too much government intervention. Why do I have the feeling that the added sound is for the sighted and not the blind?

  2. David Boles – New York City – David Boles was born in Nebraska and holds an MFA from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher who writes across the live stage, print, radio, television, film, and the web. With more than 50 books in print, David continues to write 2MM words a year and has authored over 25K articles. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, and founded The United Stage advocacy platform on the principle that playwrights have a duty to direct their own work. Read the Prairie Voice Archive at Boles.com | Buy his books at David Boles Books Writing & Publishing at BolesBooks.com | Study with Script Professor at ScriptProfessor.com | Touch American Sign Language mastery at Hardcore ASL at HardcoreASL.com | Explore the Human Meme podcast at HumanMeme.com | Train with Boles Bells at BolesBells.com.
    David W. Boles says:

    You might be on to something there, Anne. The Blind always have to struggle to adapt and adjust to their environment while the sighted to tend to be more lazy — they prefer to hear an oncoming car to judge its distance than to lift up their head to look at it.
    I hope this ridiculousness will soon be retired. I remember a similar hoo-ha when cars became “soundproof” inside and there was a fear that the interior of the cars were “too quiet” and that drivers would not hear sirens or calls for help from the street.

  3. Pingback: Chasing Cobblestones: Underfoot and Smothered in Asphalt in the Jersey City Heights « Boles Blogs

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