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Comment by RobertoG | Hacker News Reader

This is really a pity. Maybe, instead of noise, other options are available that nobody is exploring.

Maybe projecting a laser in the road ahead or something like that.

Sound is important, not sure if lasers on the road will give you instantly a 3d spacial position as sound does. I did not enountered electric cars so far but I had this problems with silent bicycles, you walk minding your own business and something appears besides you without you expecting it to be there, if you did a side step in that moment you would have been hit.

Our brain and ears are evolved to interpret sounds so laser workarounds won't be as effective.

I harldy think we have evolved to react to car noises.

I mean if you hear noise you can instantly know from where you hear it, you can most of the time know if the car is moving toward you or away from you and you know if it is close or far away.

If you see a laser on the road then you don't get any instant information, what if there are more then 1 car and project light.

Anyway I meant that sound in general, we can instantly know where the sound comes from and we do not need to actively think about it.

I think you do get a lot of information from lasers on the road. At my job the fork lift trucks have blue lasers and it works very well.

I never heard of that, can you point me how to google it? I am really curious to read about it

As a cyclist, my experience (in the US) is that pedestrians frequently react to a warning of "on your left/right" with a startled, "huh?" reaction, and turn around to the left to see what's happening. This inevitably puts them in my path, where they weren't before.

Unless I'm in a place where people generally understand the concept (shared use recreational bike paths), I don't give an audible warning unless the person is walking erratically, waving their arms as the talk, etc.

Broadly speaking, if I want people to keep doing what they're doing so I can pass safely, my experience is that it's better to just pass silently. If I want somebody to alter their behavior so I can pass safely, I'll alert them.

When I say ‘on your left/right’ when on a bike I make sure I have given them plenty of time and prepare to pass on the opposite side, because the main reaction I generally get is someone stepping into the side I said - a lot of people have difficulty with their sides, and/or the processing time for something like that is always longer than you expect!

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