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Hybrid cars silent, deadly, advocates for blind warn

By Peter Rice
Wednesday, May 23, 2007

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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."