WHAT DOES SILENCE SOUND LIKE?

A blog from  my Husband.

What should silence sound like? The coming months will see the introduction of electric buses in York. Some towns in the UK already have these, and electric/hybrid cars are on the increase, with plans for tax advantages for commercial and private hire vehicles such as taxis. LC and I were walking in London a few weeks back and we came to a relatively quiet side road which we needed to cross. What do you hear when you're crossing a road? I am reasonably good at judging the distance and speed of a vehicle, whether it's a car, bus or truck, whether it's coming from the right or left and usually whether it's going to turn in to the street I am about to cross. Strangely, heavy fog makes this a bit more tricky as sound travels differently in humid air. Wet roads and snow also change things quite a bit. Anyway, back to the point… We were about to cross this road and, thankfully, LC refused to leave the kerb. A couple of seconds after her refusal to cross, an electric vehicle swished by like some kind of deadly ghost - I certainly felt a chill run down my spine but this was probably due to real rather than spectral fear! I recently saw some evidence which suggests that electric/hybrid vehicle accident rates are 25% higher than for other types of vehicles, although this needs corroborating through data from other countries. It's certainly true that they are an extremely dangerous addition to the environment for blind and partially sighted people. But what should a so-called silent vehicle sound like? The European Parliament is in the process of agreeing regulations which will make an audio alert mandatory, but, in a somewhat stupid move, it has also made a pause switch mandatory so drivers will be able to turn off the sound! The time scales for introduction are also stupidly long; probably 5 years or even more. The regulation will state that a hybrid or electric vehicle must give a similar sound to a vehicle with a combustion engine, although the reality of this is far from clear. Tests in the USA have come up with some sounds which we will apparently find easy to detect. I was advised to listen to them with good head phones, although I still found them be almost inaudible. One of them sounded like those electric milk floats you sometimes get, although I can't remember the last time I actually heard one of these on our streets, so that might work. I think international efforts to agree a single sound for such vehicles are doomed to failure because manufacturers will want their own sound. If I build a luxury electric car, I don't want it to sound like Onzlo's van, (er that's from Keeping Up Appearances for those not in the know, one of the best comedy shows ever to come out of the UK in my view). What we are going to need to do is to agree characteristics of sounds to be used, including the distance at which you should be able to hear the sound, so that I don't have to rely on LC to refuse to cross a road and probably save me from serious injury or worse. A UN committee will now be working on an international regulation which I hope will be better than what is about to be agreed in Europe. I will be a part of that process. Having a pause switch so drivers can disable the sound is plain stupid. I know we need to reduce the level of noise in the environment, but we also have to take care of pedestrians who are much more likely to be seriously injured or killed by a vehicle they can't hear. We would never seriously think about disabling lights, so it's just daft that they are thinking about this for the audio alert. I wonder what a driver's insurance position might be if they are involved in an accident with a pedestrian and their pause switch is enabled, turning off the audio alert? I think I might go and ask that question of a few insurance companies now….

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