A new regulation was introduced on July 1st 2019 to ensure that all
electric motor vehicles made from that date would include a sound
generation device that worked up to the speed of 20 km an hour or
approximately 13 miles per hour.
This speed might seem pretty random to people in the UK but 20 km an
hour is the speed limit for driving through the newly designed
pedestrianised housing estates in some countries of northern Europe.
However, defining the upper limit of such sound generation at such a
low speed is ridiculous, and in my opinion should have been set at 80 km
an hour or 50 miles per hour if there had to be a limit at all.
This sound generation was introduced because it was believed that
pedestrians and cyclists were confused by the Silent moving vehicles but
having the sound being able to be cut off at such a low speed they would
still not know whether an electric vehicle was approaching them from
behind. For a visually impaired person the situation will be even worse,
because if they are standing at the kerbside listening out for traffic
they might hear one of these electric vehicles and wait for it to pass
before attempting to cross the road, but if this sound stops they will
not know whether the vehicle has accelerated past the limit or if the
vehicle has stopped all gone in a different Direction.
As with all legislation drawn up by politicians this one seems to have
gone a long way into achieving absolutely nothing. Though with the
number of shared space areas in British towns and silent Running
electric vehicles this could actually help the UK government’s strategy
of reducing the number of visually impaired people in the country, or at
least the number of those willing to leave home Alone.
