Hybrid cars silent, deadly, advocates for blind warn
By Peter Rice
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Art Schreiber took a walk in his Old Town neighborhood recently - he often
does while on the hunt for a bite to eat or just to run some errands.
Approaching the corner of 12th Street and Roma Avenue Southwest, he stopped
to do what all blind people do at intersections: listen for cars.
Hearing none, he started to walk across the street.
"Suddenly, I hear a horn and a screeching of brakes," he said. "The driver
swerved to miss me. Fortunately, there was nothing coming the other way."
Schreiber had nearly been injured or killed by what is an increasingly
vexing problem facing the visually impaired, and, some say, pedestrians in
general: superquiet hybrid cars.
"I didn't hear anything," Schreiber said. "It's going to be, more and more,
a problem. I don't know what we're going to do."
At lower speeds, hybrids run off of batteries, which means the engine makes
almost no noise. A louder gasoline engine kicks in at higher speeds.
The cars are proving popular, and manufacturers are struggling to keep up
with demand. But worries grow right along with the popularity.
"The strides that we've made in terms of training blind people to travel
independently are in jeopardy," said Greg Trapp, the executive director of
the New Mexico Commission for the Blind. "This is an issue of life and
death."
Imagine another scenario: Someone with 20/20 vision is putting groceries in
the back of a car. He hears a conventional car behind him, then looks over
at it.
"That's the reaction that keeps you from backing up into the path of a car,"
Trapp said. "I really think this is an issue that goes beyond people who are
blind and visually impaired."
So, what to do? One obvious solution is to install some sort of noise-making
device on the cars.
"Everybody that we've talked to on the engineering side says that there are
technical fixes," said Fred Schroeder, a vice president at the National
Federation of the Blind. But, "we've contacted the major car manufacturers
many times and really not had a response from them."
The big fish in the hybrid pond is Toyota, which has sold just over 500,000
hybrid cars in the United States since 2000 and leads the world in
manufacturing the vehicles.
"Toyota is aware of this issue, and we are studying it," said Sam Butto, a
spokesman for the company. He said it was a matter of balancing concerns
about the visually impaired with concerns about noise pollution.
One Albuquerquean is offering what could become a technical solution to the
problem. Mike Langner, the retired engineer of KKOB radio, says an
enterprising company could put together a motion-sensing device that could
give a sound-based clue about approaching objects.
Pack it all together and it could act as a kind of flashlight that blind
people could use to avoid hybrids.
"It's all commercial, off-the-shelf stuff," Langner said. "It just needs to
be put together."
Trapp called it a laudable idea, but said it's a long way off and could
present some problems, such as what would happen if the batteries died.
"I tend to favor low-tech solutions," he said. "We really need a solution
that will solve the problem that we're encountering today."
© 2006 The Albuquerque Tribune