The Sounds of EV Silence Are Deadly

Jo Nova puts out great stuff almost every day. She is a great resource. Her post today is especially intriguing because it deals with an EV issue not many are discussing; the safety of pedestrians. EVs, you see, are silent or nearly silent and that's a problem.

Source: https://pixabay.com/users/couleur-1195798/

Nova quotes from, and comments upon, an article in SciTech Daily. I decided to dig just a little deeper and look at the study behind the article. It's titled “Pedestrian safety on the road to net zero: cross-sectional study of collisions with electric and hybrid-electric cars in Great Britain” and here is the abstract which speaks for itself (emphasis added):

Background: Plans to phase out fossil fuel-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and to replace these with electric and hybrid-electric (E-HE) vehicles represent a historic step to reduce air pollution and address the climate emergency. However, there are concerns that E-HE cars are more hazardous to pedestrians, due to being quieter. We investigated and compared injury risks to pedestrians from E-HE and ICE cars in urban and rural environments.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study of pedestrians injured by cars or taxis in Great Britain. We estimated casualty rates per 100 million miles of travel by E-HE and ICE vehicles. Numerators (pedestrians) were extracted from STATS19 datasets. Denominators (car travel) were estimated by multiplying average annual mileage (using National Travel Survey datasets) by numbers of vehicles. We used Poisson regression to investigate modifying effects of environments where collisions occurred.

Results: During 2013–2017, casualty rates per 100 million miles were 5.16 (95% CI 4.92 to 5.42) for E-HE vehicles and 2.40 (95%CI 2.38 to 2.41) for ICE vehicles, indicating that collisions were twice as likely (RR 2.15; 95% CI 2.05 to 2.26) with E-HE vehicles. Poisson regression found no evidence that E-HE vehicles were more dangerous in rural environments (RR 0.91; 95% CI 0.74 to 1.11); but strong evidence that E-HE vehicles were three times more dangerous than ICE vehicles in urban environments (RR 2.97; 95% CI 2.41 to 3.7). Sensitivity analyses of missing data support main findings.

Conclusion: E-HE cars pose greater risk to pedestrians than ICE cars in urban environments. This risk must be mitigated as governments phase out petrol and diesel cars.

Don't you love the assumption that governments will be able to eliminate internal combustion engine vehicles? This is academia, of course, where political correctness is a fundamental requirement to ensure no one risks losing future funding from government and/or the Big Green Grifters.

And, then, there is the very interesting fact that rural pedestrians (and, yes, there many rural folks who walk and cross roads) don't seem to face the same dangers as city folks. Could this be a sign of greater alertness? I think that's the only logical conclusion. What do you think?

#EVs #Noise #Pedestrians #Hazards #Silence #Urban #Rural #City