I have not heard a single affirmative reason to keep AM in cars as a technology at this late a date.
I look forward to finally hearing one ... some day.
I look forward to finally hearing one ... some day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment
> The Minot train derailment occurred just west of Minot, North Dakota, United States, on January 18, 2002, when a Canadian Pacific Railway freight train derailed, spreading ammonia gas across the city, delaying rescue operations. The cause was found to be small fatigue cracks in the rails and joint bars, not detectable by the inspection routines then enforced by Canadian Pacific.
[snip]
> Because it was the middle of the night, there were few people at local radio stations, all operated by Clear Channel with mostly automated programming. No formal emergency warnings were issued for several hours while Minot officials located station managers at home. North Dakota's public radio network, Prairie Public Broadcasting, was notified and did broadcast warnings to citizens.
Public radio succeeded. Commercial radio did not. People have been utterly resistant to learning this lesson. Maybe once commercial radio is dead they'll have no other choice.
It may suck for that, but it's the best choice out of a whole bunch of bad alternatives. What would do this better?
A mix of things, some of which already exist.
Obviously, cell phones can do it. They already do this for a lot of people.
NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards already exists as well, but the receivers should be more widespread. Putting them into cars and TV sets would be a good start, especially with GPS receivers to automatically figure out where they are and, therefore, which alerts to listen to.
https://www.weather.gov/nwr&ln_desc=NOAA+Weather+Radio/
Giving more funding to noncommercial radio stations, to guarantee they exist, for one thing, and have people in the booth all the time, for another. America doesn't have an analogue to the BBC so ensuring the local and regional public stations remain usable for this purpose is essential.
That's separate from how well they work in remote areas (but that is getting better over time).
Only if the disaster is mild enough that cell phones still work. And let's not forget that there are enormous areas of the US where there is no reliable (or any) cell service.
I'm just hoping that for disaster communications, nobody is actually deciding to cut some people off just because there aren't enough of them.
That said with fewer people listening to music on the radio these days, it is becoming more common to find talk radio on FM.