Let's Japan.org Debunking Eikaiwa and Ramblings in Japan

For the past while, I've been seeing reports on TV and in the newspapers about the danger of hybrid vehicles being too quiet when running on battery power at low speeds. This isn't something new, but as more hybrids take to the roads, pedestrians are worrying about their safety. The Japan Times reported on it last month:

One of the virtues of owning a hybrid or electric car is its super-quiet noise signature. But worries are growing that blind people are being endangered by the vehicles' silence.

The government has set up a panel involving automakers, consumer groups and organizations for the blind to find a solution, which could lead to the emission of virtual engine noise or sounds similar to cell phone ring tones, officials said.

A legal change would be needed to equip the vehicles with the special noise-making feature.

As for the panel, documents from the their initial meeting suggest that it's not clear a serious problem even exists. One document [PDF] points out that automakers have received 60 inquiries about the quietness of hybrids over the past 4 years. A sampling of the comments suggests the silence of the cars is more of an annoyance than an danger with comments ranging from someone being startled by a hybrid silently creeping up next to them to the hope that hybrids get some other device beside their horn to alert pedestrians.

The danger from quiet hybrids sounds overblown. First, it's not clear that a problem exists. Is the Prius really that quiet or it is the high ambient noise level that makes the car difficult to hear? Lord knows Japan's cities have a terrible noise pollution problem. It's also not clear how mandating that hybrids make a fake engine noise or emit a chime increases safety when regular "noisy" cars aren't any less prone to running over people. Are the horns hybrids are equipped with not good enough to warn people? Is this really a problem with the car or with pedestrians and drivers failing to pay attention to their surroundings or drive with care?

Apart from their fuel economy, hybrid vehicles are an opportunity to reduce the noise pollution that surrounds us all day. The silence of hybrids should be a plus, not a problem. The transport ministry forgets that part of what makes the experience of pedestrian zones (hokosha tengoku) and other public places inviting and pleasurable is their absence of vehicles and the din of traffic. Rather than trying to find a way for pedestrians and cars to co-exist, perhaps the transport ministry should think about separating the two instead of applying a techno band-aid.

The fake engine noise requirement doesn't bode well for electric vehicles if and when they are mass produced. Will they have to make noise as well? The answer, at least in the U.S., seems to be, yes. Cue "car tones."

The truth about cheap highway tolls:

Last weekend we visited my wife’s family in Iwate prefecture 530 km (320 miles) north of Tokyo and paid only 1,700 yen ($17) one-way in tolls, much cheaper than the 10,000 yen that it would have cost on a weekday. The shinkansen (bullet train) would have set the four of us back almost 35,000 yen.

To beat the traffic we got up at the crack of dawn, loaded up the SUV with three days worth of clothes, diapers, and enough toys to occupy the kids, and hit the road at 6:30.

Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea. We immediately ran into heavy traffic on the Tohoku Expressway and crawled along around 40 km per hour through much of the first 100 km before things eased up a bit.

Just when we thought the worst was over, we hit a 25-km backup that looked like a parking lot. All we could do was grin and bear the bumper-to-bumper traffic as my 11-month-old son threw a fit in the back seat while my 5-year-old boy said: “Dad, we should have taken the shinkansen.”

I never wanted to get to my in-laws’ faster than at that moment.

We eventually made it in about 9-1/2 hours – more than three hours longer than it would have taken had there been no traffic jams.

“Next time, let’s not go on a 1,000-yen weekend,” my wife said.

And yet the public does this every year with the full knowledge that the roads will be clogged. But because they think they are getting a deal, they don't stop to think about the diminishing returns of cheap highway tolls: more people on the roads, longer traffic jams, and more time wasted sitting in traffic. It's interesting how people love a bargain but place so little value on their own time. It may be cheap to drive from Tokyo to Aomori for ¥1,000, but paying the extra money for shinkansen tickets to travel a lot quicker and more comfortably surely outweighs a 9-1/2 hour drive. This is something that even the author's child understands.