Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud.
If we didn’t have cars, we’d have much less noise pollution, including the ufo sound.
That UFO sound is so goddamn irritating as well. Could they not have picked something that sounded, I dunno, like a car? Why did it need to be a noise that no one would immediately recognize as a vehicle? And why are they all slightly different, it’s not the electric motor noise, it’s gotta be piped out speakers right, so they could/should all sound the same?
i like the ones that sound like the jetsons flying cars
It should legally mandated to be a specific white noise signal (any random source OK). It’s the best tone for getting people to understand where something is.
A quieter version of the backup beep would be better. Everyone all over the world knows what it means.
You want that for slow forward driving? That’s crazy. The whole city would be continously beeping in its harsh rythm.
It would be safer than making a noise people can’t identify and have a hard time finding the direction of.
Make it as loud as the current ones, just interrupt it every second so it’s clearly a beep coming from something that could kill you.
Destroying the mental health of everyone around, especially local residents by non-stop multifold beeping is counter productive, especially as it takes only a short time for people learning the space electro sounds being deadly EVs approaching, that sound is of course also just as directional. If that were confusing (which I find that it is not and we do have already plenty of exposure with EVs here in Austria) one can standardise the sound but at no point does it have to be harsh beeping as if the whole city were one big non-stop construction site. It is not about the loudness, it is about the very feature you demand, that constant abruptness all the traffic noise pollution. That is mentally much more tiring than the existing sounds for EVs.
Alex from Technology Connections agrees with me so I’m not convinced.
His name is Alec, like alec baldwin
Also when the hell did he say that? I’m 99% certain he only said that white noise is better for cars backing up.Well, if you want to live in such an acoustic hell hole, you are welcome. I am happily not living in one and can easily hear slowly approaching EVs, at least any of the newer ones. Anyone who manages to hear ICE cars, can also hear those EVs. It is also really hard to mistake their sound for anything else, unless you are expecting being abducted by UFOs anytime now.
Only those EVs are a problem that were produced before regulations requiring artificial sound at low speeds.
PS: I am walking a fair share on my daily commute, so I do know that perspective, also in regards to EVs.
I’ve heard one BMW that sounds exactly like a car engine. I think some brands allow you to choose.
Knowing BMW they charge you a subscription for that.
Imagine if you could choose anything you want as the noise :D It would be hilarious, then horrible
you could with Tesla’s, I read some news articles a few years back about the ada or some other government agency getting pissy about it and requiring them to prevent it.
someone picks entire bee movie as their alert sound
Wait, that is an artificially created sound??
If i understand you correctly, yes. Older electric cars were much quieter, but they added the sound because people didn’t hear it approaching.
I could hear and feel the subway from six stories up when I was in New York last month.
Yup the subway is loud too
So then it’s not just cars that make cities loud.
It’s mostly the cars.
So it wasn’t delivery trucks and emergency vehicles waking me up every 30 minutes for three nights straight?
You’re not going to pile people up like that and meet their needs and have it be quiet. It’s just not possible.
They could be quieter if they didn’t have to compete with cars. I don’t know why you’re defending cars so much. If you don’t like noise, having fewer cars makes the city way quieter.
I’m not defending cars. I’m hating on cities.
Cities are very loud with or without cars.
weird that the areas without cars are quiet then, how do you explain that?
Removed by mod
Name 3 other constant sound sources. Construction does not count.
the wind on the skyscrapers, car horns, airplanes
Air conditioners, commercial refrigerators and transformers. If you interpreted this as an attack on your ideology that was a mistake it actually was an attack on your intellectual integrity.
Those things arent very loud lol
False
Hooves on cobblestone
Barkers hawking their wares
Knife grinders
What about bards that woo young maiden?
There’s at least one EV that parks outside my building. I can tell because every night like clockwork it sounds like a 50’s era sci-fi flying saucer is taking off.
That being said, I’ve almost been mowed down by a few whisper quiet ones when they shoot out of blind alleys.
It would be nice to have a happy medium.
I feel like this is one of those cases where the solution is just being really really precise about how it’s done, like it’s gotta be juuuuuuust the right sound and it’s gotta ramp up in volume in precisely the right way depending on both the speed AND acceleration and maybe the cars even need microphones so they can adjust the sound according to the acoustics around them… Or, you know, we could just stop having cars near people.
I’ve done this kinda tweaking with the acceleration and braking on my e-scooter and it makes a world of difference to how it comes from the factory, it feels waaaaaay safer and easier to control.
What about bicycles? I understand they’re less dangerous than cars but if i had a euro for every time someone just walked into the street without looking because they didn’t hear any cars, I’d be able to afford a very nice new bike. How do blind people deal with those?
Most cyclists I’ve had the misfortune of encountering in my walks in the city seem to believe it’s their civic duty to run as many pedestrians as possible into oncoming traffic, and that traffic lights and signals don’t apply to them.
They do have bike lanes, they just prefer to use the sidewalks, it gives them more targets to bully.
Those bastards in those little electric scooters too. Absolute menaces to society.
You don’t want to walk, use the fucking bus, or tram, or subway, or whatever (and don’t get me started on the absolute rectums who get on the bus or train and take all the space with their fucking wheeled contraption instead of using it, evil lazy bastards that they are).
Wheeled vehicles of any kind (powered or not) other than wheelchairs, public transport and utility, and maybe delivery vehicles for limited hours belong in the fields with the rest of the livestock, not in the cities causing mayhem.
Any time a bike is on a sidewalk, there is a systemic reason.
The one exception is if it is the bicycler’s first day and they are lost.
Otherwise, the road or bike lane is too dangerous or poorly designed and that’s why the bike chose the sidewalk with all the pedestrians in the way.
Or, you know, some people are just assholes.
As a dutch person in a very bikeable city, this is not usually the case lol.
It’s mostly people biking on the sidewalk because they were too lazy to walk their bike to the street before getting on, and then they look for a ramp off because just riding off the kerb while on it destroys your tyres if you do it too often.
These are both examples of systemic issues.
What’s the systemic issue? The only issue is people feel they have to get on their bike as soon as they get on their way, where they could just walk off the sidewalk and step on there. Which is maybe an extra 2 metres.
You might not be happy with the answer: infrastructure that forces bike riders to choose between riding their bike with pedestrians, or walk the bike to join the bike infrastructure.
You don’t see car drivers having to share their infrastructure with pedestrians or vice versa.
I think the systemic issue is just a lot of people being inconsiderate. Yes you have to choose. That should not be a problem for most people, as one of the choices is the obviously correct one, and the other is obviously illegal (even if it’s practically unenforced, everyone knows you’re not allowed to ride a bike on the sidewalk).
You don’t see car drivers having to share their infrastructure with pedestrians or vice versa.
Well yea, because cars don’t fit on the sidewalk. And where they would, you often see barriers explicitly blocking cars, which are often installed because car drivers were ignoring laws and driving there anyway.
The issue is that’s not really possible for bikes, because when you make something that blocks bikes from entering, it’s going to block pedestrians as well. They are practically the same width.
Correct. The systemic issue being that people are assholes and shouldn’t be allowed to operate vehicles near other people.
When people say “biking on the sidewalk”, I don’t think most people are talking about the last 10 metres from the parking to the dedicated bike path. They usually mean riding hundreds of metres up into the kilometres along footpaths.
The necessary approach to fix the issue is different in both cases. In the case I think most people mean, the fix is…install proper dedicated bike paths.
In the case you describe, the answer is that kerb cuts should be fairly frequent to minimise the distance needed, and to mark the space around popular bike parking areas as a shared space, probably with some different colour tiling and tactile ground to make it clear to everyone (pedestrian and cyclist alike) that the space is shared and they should be careful.
I’m also not necessarily talking about people that do this for 10 metres, that would be fine. But there are a lot of people that will get on a sidewalk the first chance they get even if their destination is past another 5 ramps.
You also don’t need a ramp that often for a bike, and afaik they’re not even meant for them. You get off the bike on the road, and walk the bike up the kerb. Pretty much any road you’re allowed to bike on you’re also allowed to stop on. We don’t have those ramps at regular intervals for bikes, they’re pretty much only in places where pedestrians cross the street, where you’ll see a ramp on both sides of the road.
Of course, of course. How dare these peasants take away space from the poor poor cars! Won’t anybody think of the cars!
Strange. I keep finding pedestrians using the bike lanes.
Bikes are much less dangerous and much more manouverable. Bikes are used to anticipating the many unpredictable ways pedestrians may move and avoid them appropriately.
The bike bell can help too.
Better infrastructure would be best
A lot of cyclists are just as oblivious as a lot of pedestrians. Sometimes I really wonder how all these people are even alive.
Til this is also c/fuckbikes
I’m pretty sure once we dig enough it’s just c/fuckpeople
I would be aurprised if this were the case. Surely it would never be c/fuckpedestrians
pedestrians can suck too, i’d say fundamentally it’s c/fuckshittythoughtlessinfrastructuredesign
That’s weird, because EVs have exactly the same road noise (from their tyres) as other cars, and that’s loud. When they’re slow, the warning sounds are louder than some well-silenced combustion engines.
Reading the article, it seems to be mostly complaining about pre-2021 EVs, which weren’t required to have noise generators, so I think it’s really a nothingburger.
It’s an old misleading story against EVs in new cloths.
Even pre 2021 the noise generation when driving slow was just a standard feature.
Do you know how many times I’ve hit a pedestrian or nearly hit a pedestrian in my EV?
Zero, because I don’t drive like a nobhead and pay attention.
my brother almost got hit by one, both me and him really like cars btw (not electric ones though)
wrong answer to the right question
Make the city navigable by foot
We don’t need more EV noise, we need better drivers.
If I’m driving through an urban area, I’m paying attention to pedestrians. If someone is stepping out then I’m anticipating that and not running them over.
Someone in a tabard with a guide dog is getting maximum attention.
I honestly believe most drivers are the same.
i’m convinced the core problem is that cars fuck up your view of the world.
Stuff like not hearing your surroundings and the sounds your own cars makes, the big hood and all the other parts of the car blocking the view, probably the fact that you’re seated plays a part as well, and of course the absolute lack of subtle feedback to the controls.When you get into a car it becomes way more difficult to do any sort of fine adjustments and suddenly 15km/h feels painfully slow, so a driver who thinks they’re crawling along is actually going fast enough that they have absolutely no chance of stopping in time if something pops out from around a corner.
If the problem with electric cars is that they’re silent, then why would you replace them with ICE cars when you could just make them louder?
Or, you know, just play music…
Odd, I sometimes have the feeling those pedestrian warning UFO sounds are sometimes louder than a quet-ish petrol engine would be, ie louder than necessary. But it is true that some cars don’t have them at all.
yea, we have an equinox EV, and it sounds like you are acending to heaven.
Im wondeirng how hard it would be to intercept the speaker signal, and play my own sounds, at a similar pitch/volume, say… a tie fighter
Meanwhile as someone who exists in urban environments cars are still too damn loud
Harley Davidson, the official transport of man with erectile disfunction has entered the chat.
I may be fucking deaf but those things are still too loud
Isn’t the required volume and type of slow driving EV noise regulated in the EU? Oh wait, that’s the UK. No red tape Brexit benefits?
EU too. The rules seem pretty good actually and I think they might actually improve safety. On my bike tbh I use noise to check if there are cars all the time. Never had many issues tho, but most cars are not electric
Most EVs with driver’s assist have sensors to detect other cars, curbs, and lanes. Wonder if they could also be trained to detect bicyclists or pedestrians and play sounds (in addition to slowing down).
Some of these tools are being used to supplement drivers lack of skill. All manules tell drivers of EVs to be aware that pedestrians may not realise you are there. I don’t know many they follow that guidance.
It’s the frustrating thing with adding safety features to almost anything.
You add a thing to make something safer under normal conditions by catching the edge cases and mistakes.
People treat a safety feature as a quality of life feature and stop paying as much attention.
Nothing changes unless your change is non-obvious (my car will increase how much brake a certain depression of the pedal implies based on how imminent it thinks an impact is. If it thinks you need to brake, and you confirm that by hitting the brakes, it’ll say “cool, lemme just adjust the force per the radar then”), or the lazy approach is just legitimately safer (backing up a car while staring at a backup camera is still safer than only looking at the rearview mirror. Both are wrong, but the easier wrong is still safer).Ultimately, people will use as much effort as they feel is justified for a safety budget. If you make it harder and safer people won’t use it, and if the easier outpaces the safety they won’t keep doing both since it’s not safety driving the choice.
With power tools adding safety features makes people a little more cavalier, but it’s their safety vs their convenience.
With a car, it’s my convenience versus your “bone integrity”, which is why it so often results in people acting extra shitty.I doubt most people read the manual. And with all the assist tools it almost takes aware the fear of making misrakes the bad drivers should have.
Maybe pedestrians can have a wearable device that pings when EV’s are close.
that’s fucking dystopian
You are being downvoted because its the car driver responsibly to not pull out unless safe, but a device that emitted a radio frequencies that EV systems could detect and warn driver would save lives
For sure it would. To those down voting me: obviously it’s the drivers responsibility to drive safely. Added technological innovations that can augment public safety for persons suffering disabilities should be explored.
