By Mary Ellen Gabias
Letter sent to media, 2008

The global romance with the automobile has been a somewhat tawdry love affair. Cars are a wonderful convenience. They’ve broadened the horizons of millions of people and helped this vast country come together by making it easier for Canadians to travel from sea to sea to sea. They’ve also encouraged urban sprawl, created air pollution, and filled countless junk yards.

Because practically everyone relies on the private automobile, public transportation has been treated like a poor relation. People who don’t own cars or who can’t drive them practice creative problem solving in order to get around efficiently. They succeed because staying home is not an option. Those who can’t find a way to get access to wheels live as second class citizens.

More and more cities are trying to dethrone king car, or at least make sure that public transit shares a corner of the throne. However, I doubt most people will easily give up the freedom and convenience of the private car.

Though my husband, Paul, and I are both blind and use the bus, we pay for a car and arrange to have it driven because it’s more convenient to load groceries in our trunk than to schlep them home in a back pack or grocery cart. Like most North Americans, we’re willing to pay in order to be lazy. I’m ashamed to say that, like most North Americans, we’re willing to make the environment pay too.

That’s why the hybrid and all-electric car sounded like such a good idea to me. We could save the environment and gas money at the same time. What a deal! Unfortunately, it’s a deal which gives us all more than we bargained for.

Hybrid cars are quiet, very quiet. In fact, when they run on their electric motors they’re virtually silent. It’s a great selling point for people who want to eliminate noise pollution, but it’s a terrifying prospect for blind pedestrians who listen to the sounds cars make in order to know where vehicles are. Imagine a technology that could make cars invisible. They would still weigh several tons. They would still travel fast enough to knock you flat and injure or kill you. The only change would be that you would no longer be able to see where they were. How confident and safe would you feel walking through a parking lot or across a street?

Blind people aren’t the only ones endangered. Traffic safety programs in schools teach sighted children to stop, look, AND LISTEN for good reason. Everybody needs sound to be alerted to the presence of an unseen moving car. As the number of hybrid and all-electric cars grows, I predict pedestrian injuries will increase too. The walking public may come to think of electric cars as stealth killers.

Some have suggested that installing audible pedestrian signals at traffic lights will solve our problems. These are walk lights with sound, usually chirping birds or other beeping apparatuses. Sorry, no cigar, not even close. First, the beeping and chirping obscures noise, particularly the miniscule noise made by electric cars. Second, audible signals cost several thousand dollars apiece. It would cost many millions to install them at every traffic light in the country. Third, there are many intersections without traffic lights where a pedestrian could be struck by a quiet car, not to mention parking lots or cars backing out of driveways. But, perhaps the most important flaw in the reasoning underlying the advocacy of audible signals becomes clear when considering traffic safety taught to sighted people. Would you put your faith in the walk light without looking at what the cars are doing? Not if you intend to live a long and healthy life. No one has ever been injured by a walk signal, but many people have been injured by cars that haven’t obeyed the signal. That’s why sighted people look at the walk sign and the traffic. That’s why blind people must be able to hear the traffic.

Electric car manufacturers could solve the problem inexpensively with a little engineering. They would need to design electric motors that sound like a car idling. The sound wouldn’t need to be as loud as the internal combustion engine, just loud enough to alert pedestrians to the presence of the vehicle. Noise pollution could still be significantly abated.

No one set out to endanger blind pedestrians and others when they designed silent cars. It never occurred to them to consider us at all. We weren’t on the radar screen.

The National Federation of the Blind in the United States and the Canadian Federation of the Blind intend to educate not only car manufacturers but the general public. I believe your readership would want to know about this problem. It would be good to find a solution to this issue before anyone is injured or worse.

Blind people walk the streets with confidence and pleasure. We are determined to keep it that way. Staying home is not an option.