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Comment by kaybe | Hacker News Reader

It's dangerous if pedestrians and cyclists expect to hear cars and they approach silently.

Maybe they shouldn't expect that then. Lots of cities have trolleybuses, trams, and other electric transport without carnage on the roads.

Trams aren't as silent due to the rails.

As a cyclist, I can confirm that, unfortunately, the pedestrians do rely on sound quite a lot in figuring out whether a vehicle is dangerous: if you're silent, they won't try to avoid you that much. Sometimes it becomes ridiculous: a pedestrian looks in your direction and proceeds walking across, in the middle of the street, forcing you to brake to a halt. They don't do that to cars.

Clearly not scalable in the future, where amount of electric vehicles will keep increasing (not just cars: scooters and e-bikes too). I'm a fairly passionate pedestrian but we can't expect to be able to stay safe by hearing alone.

Consideration for blind people is an important argument but it seems so much saner to require quiet vehicles to have a radio transponder that can send exact speed and direction rather than having people identify these by hearing beeps or fake engine noise.

Not following. How do radio signals help a kid stepping off a curb? Not everybody owns a phone; not everybody has it on and running the 'don't get run over' app.

We've been trained as a people to respond to environmental cues. The learning period to adjust to different cues (beeps, phone apps etc) is another phrase for 'lots of people get hit by silent cars'.

I'd suggest a period of dual cues - make noise, AND whatever else we imagine could help us not get run over. Eventually the noise part might fade away.

Radio signals to help blind people, replacing sound.

The learning period for "vehicles don't make noise at speeds that can kill you" has already begun. Priuses have been around for 10 years.

Until a sizeable fraction of the cars on the road are silent, the learning period has not yet significantly begun.

Great, so it's begun in Vancouver and San Francisco. Forefront of transportation :)

A car would have to be some sort of magical hovercraft to approach silently, because tires rolling on asphalt make lots of noise whether the engine contributes or not.

This is true, but as a cyclist, often the sound of my own tires on the road, plus the wind in my ears and sometimes even my own breathing, masks the road noise of an oncoming electric car.

Reasonable point - I was thinking about it only from the perspective of a pedestrian, as I don't ride a bicycle myself.

I was almost run over by a Nissan Leaf 2 weeks ago because it crept up behind me on soft snow. It was only going about 5-10 km/h. They could definitely manage to kill a child.

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