Hi folks, Our representative government only works when we let our Congress critters know what we think. Unfortunately, HR 5734, the "Bell the Hybrid" Act, has been proposed and we need to let our voices (and in November our votes) be known too. There is a real problem with pedestrian and bike accidents since our car can easily cause death and severe injuries. But the right answer is to focus on vehicle-pedestrian accidents. The blind may be at the leading edge but of the 4,784 pedestrians killed in 2006, I suspect the blind were a small percentage. Unfortunately this proposed legislation is fatally flawed but it is correctable. My suggestions show deletes in italics and additions in bold: GovTrack: H.R. 5734: Text of Legislation My proposed edits have the goal of solving the bigger problem, the 5,000 deaths per year from vehicle and people and biker accidents. We need to quantify the problem; look at all possible solutions; pick the one that has the highest probability of success; and verify the results by monitoring what happens,. If the system fails to perform, make sure that it goes away, which will also let us evaluate if it was working. Bob Wilson
Good job Bob. Thanks for taking the time to do this. I am going to send an e-mail to my congressman, and senators. Jeff Davis, Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning in Kentucky with your suggestions.
I think we need to pay more in taxes tp allow idiots like this to keep working so hard to solve the big problems!
Someone just needs to make a bracket that runs across the front wheel opening where we can attach baseball cards with a wooden clothes pin.
Holy Carp! Here is was minding my own business drinking a bit of water and read this! It's ok. I needed to clean the monitor face of the iMac anyway! Brilliant solution!:spit:
Hi Bob "and some part of the 4,784 pedestrians killed in 2006 were blind and struck but some percentage of hybrid vehicles with their engines off" Don't you mean "by" rather than "but"? No criticism intended, I think this is an excellent beginning to let our voice be heard. We need hard data on just what that percentage is and the level of injury incurred. I still believe however that this is blatant political opportunism on the part of Towns and Stearns. ron.
Congressman (and Senators for good measure) written... RE: H.R. 5734 ( GovTrack: H.R. 5734: Text of Legislation ) I am a Toyota Prius owner and driver and have owned my Prius for 4 1/2 years now. I purchased it to reduce the amount of gasoline I burned and to support what I viewed as the first real technological step forward in automobile technology and one that could, eventually, lead to a future where we would no longer be dependent upon foreign petroleum imports. One of the great benefits of having a Prius is that when at low speeds the internal combustion engine completely shuts off and the car rides almost silently down the road. Recently the press has picked up on a few isolated reports of concern expressed from a tiny segment of the blind community about potential risks of a blind person being struck and injured by a hybrid while running in the all electric mode. I'll try to be fairly brief, but the recent HR5734 bill bothers me greatly. First of all there have, in over 10 years of the Prius being sold in the USA, been no reports of injuries or deaths due to blind individuals being injured. Next, it's highly unlikely that a blind individual would be walking in an area where the hybrids would be in silent mode...parking lots, heavy traffic, etc. Most blind people use cross walks on roadways when ambulatory and having a need to enter a roadway. Once upon a time we used to hear about the problems of "Noise Pollution"...hybrids offer a partial solution to that problem. And now there's a proposal actually legislate more noise! That alone is really unbelievable to me. Significantly, this resolution calls for large expenditures to research this issue, implementation would cost more, enforcement hasn't been addressed (ie. many of us would find a way to disable the "sound maker"--would that make me a criminal?). Finally, for 100 years now cars have been burning gas and producing pollution known to be responsible, at least in part, for the deaths of thousands and thousands of individuals annually. If we need more legislation it should be to produce more hybrids and more clean alternative vehicles such as bettery electric vehicles and to reduce the emissions of cars already on the road without exclusions of the worst emitters such as the large SUVs like the Tahoe, Hummer and Excursions. I appreciate your time and hope that you will move to reject this resolution and encourage your fellow representatives to do likewise. I'm happy to discuss the situation further or even to take you for a ride in my Prius the next time you're in Springfield so you can see, first hand, just how ludicrous this idea is. Sincerely, Evan Fusco, MD
4784 killed in 2006? How many of those were blind and how many of those blind persons were killed by a Hybrid vehicle? My guess on that would be zero killed by Hybrids. Hope someone here has the ability to verify and pull that kind of information from the raw data. Not to toot our horns too much but Hybrid drivers are much better drivers overall than our ICE only counterparts; and that is a very large understatement. Even has the right idea to send letters to our congressmen and women and try to convince these opportunists that this type of legislation is silly at best. Sorry to say this but they might need to be reminded that they may buy a few votes with this type of legislation but there are more Hybrid owners that will not like their representative if something as foolish as this were to become law. Perhaps if the blind were to wear beanies with rotating red lights (similar to aircraft anti-collision lights) there would be less blind people being struck and killed by motor vehicles. This approach would be 100% safer for the blind as it may prevent the ICE only drivers from running down the blind. We are trying to prevent blind people from being run down; right! In the mean time we should all take Evan's lead and do it ASAP to prevent this from gaining any momentum in Congress. IMHO.
I'm just going to play quick and loose with the numbers, so I know I will probably be off a little but not too much. About 5000 pedestrians are killed per year. So approximately 15 of every one million people die as a pedestrian. This includes people killed in police chases, drunks driving onto the sidewalks, drunks walking in the road, senior citizens who have wanderd from the retirement home, children who have wandered from their parents. Because a few of these 15 people may have been blind when they met their tragic end, the other nine hundred ninty nine thousand nine hundred eighty five (999,985) citizens of the per million group should be punished with a regulation which MAY save a few of the 15 per million. Now if you want to worry about something with some real odds, something which is not addressed, since we don't want to think about it, try spending some time in the hospital. According to a multitude of studies, medical mistakes kill more in one year than 50 years of pedestrian deaths. Now that is a number which would have some meaning and should give you pause. We need to call our representatives on this issue. This is a stupid proposed law, and I am sick of politicians who have no brains for reality. The world is in quite a mess right now and we have no more time to waste on things other than the big problems. Perhaps we should pass, fund, and enforce a law that removes politicians from office if they fail common moral standards. I believe that would eliminate at least 15 a year. If you want to get rid of most of them, pass a law which removes them if they pass a dumb law. I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but we need to adress reality as it is rather than as a fairy tale, and any politician who will not serve the majority of the people, be he of any party, needs to be voted out.
Excellent letter, Evan! Do I understand you have already sent a copy to your Congressman/woman? Perhaps all of us Prius owners should do something similar.
Yup, sent last night. Write Your Representative - Contact your Congressperson in the U.S. House of Representatives. U.S. Senate: Senators Home
The proposed bill goes to great lengths to avoid saying that any blind person was struck by a hybrid. First, we have "some part" of the 4,784 pedestrians who were killed happened to be blind people. That number could be a single person; blind people tend to be a little more cautious than sighted people. Then we're told that, of this unknown number of blind pedestrians struck and killed by automobiles, "some percentage" were struck by hybrid vehicles with their engines off. "Some percentage" could well be zero. So we have a proposal to enact draconian measures (there's a lot of hybrids out there, at least here in California) to address a problem that may or may not exist, and -- if it even exists -- may be serious or may simply be reflective of the percentage of automobiles that are hybrids. Or it may even be that fewer blind people are killed by hybrids since their owners tend to be more attentive. I'd much rather see a bill outlawing morons in Congress. - Jim
I just wrote this for the next Electric Vehicle Association Newsletter. (The formatting got screwed up. Hope it looks OK here). The solution looking for a problem. Re. HR 5734 - GovTrack: H.R. 5734 [110th]: Text of Legislation, Introduced in House There is currently a bill before the House of Representatives that would require all automobiles to emit a minimum amount of noise at low speed. The impetus for this bill comes from the “blind coalition.†The idea is that if blind people cannot see the cars, then a quiet car is a hazard. I cannot fathom a good reason for cars to purposefully emit sound at ANY speed. This is a silly, expensive solution looking for a problem. And it is a “solution†that may well make all pedestrians *less* safe. Most car makers are currently assuming that this requirement will soon be law, and are scrambling to figure out how best to incorporate it – instead of working on a multitude of other more important aspects to get more EVs and hybrids on the road sooner. Car makers have spent untold millions trying to make ICE vehicles almost silent. And now we're on the cusp of legislating that they all make a minimum amount of noise. Having cars make noise so that they can be heard over the other cars is akin to the futility of always needing to drive a larger car than your neighbor to ensure the safety of your family. It is self-defeating. In a truly quiet environment, "silent" cars can be heard easily. It is typically the din of all the other cars that masks the signature sounds of EVs and hybrids. Oh... and what do we do about the segment of our population that is deaf? Legislate that all cars also need to be painted day-glow green so they will stand out from the other brightly-colored cars? If we all depend on sound to locate dangerous, mobile cars in parking lots, we’ll be in big trouble if one of the noisemakers breaks. And while all the cars are making noise, how are we expected to hear other pedestrians and cyclists around us? Quiet cars may pose a bit of a challenge for a small subset of our population. And this small subset of our population should work on ways to keep themselves safe. These same quiet cars create a more beneficial environment for the bulk of the population. Gas cars kill thousands of people indiscriminately every year due to the pollution they emit. Should we maybe be putting our time and effort into fixing the problem that is unquestionably killing people before we fool with the "problem" that does more good than harm? We don’t need more noise pollution, and we don’t need more stumbling blocks put in front of the companies who are trying to bring the cars to market that will benefit the *entire* population. Thousands of sighted pedestrians are struck and killed by our current crop of "loud" cars every year. The sound they make doesn't seem to make them "safe." What we need is more personal responsibility in the case of drivers and pedestrians (iPods anybody?) alike. As drivers, it is our responsibility to be aware of everything around us. As pedestrians and cyclists, it is our responsibility to stay out of harm’s way. Put those two concepts together, and we have a safe situation for everybody that does NOT involve increasing our noise pollution or saddling the budding EV industry with a useless (and possibly harmful) requirement.
