I live in a world of incessant back-up beeping, touted as a safety feature. I’m sure it is, but I wonder if it has been quantified. Every professional vehicle and a handful of passenger vehicles do this.
My thoughts are that children are the most vulnerable to being hit by drivers backing up, and that small children are not often present on construction sites, etc.
So how many fewer deaths and injuries do we have per capita since this noise became widespread?
Beeping is no longer the only aid to avoid backing into things. Rear view cameras and automatic object detection braking has become common (or mandatory) in the past 5 years. I’m sure the insurance companies are tracking this, but I don’t have the numbers.
I’m guessing its non-trival amount, not “seat belt laws” levels of lives saved (which actually changed the nature of emergency medicine as doctors saw so many types injuries they wouldn’t see before seat belt laws, because the paitent would be dead before they reached the ER), but a pretty decent number I recon.
The beep on locking car doors behavior OTOH has saved zero lives and is the bane of my life…
I wasn’t able to find any statistics in my (admittedly brief) google search, but I did find one thing interesting. While back-up beepers have probably prevented a lot of accidents for things like folks walking near a forklift at Lowes or Home Depot, there is actually a lot of criticism against back-up beepers on construction sites. The reason is that there are so many vehicles constantly moving around on a construction site that there are constantly back-up beepers going off, and you start running into a “cry wolf” type of thing. Construction workers hear those beepers all the time and eventually tune them out and ignore them since the beeping usually doesn’t apply to them.
There’s usually a way to turn that off, and I’ve been able to do so with a Nissan, a Ford, and a Chevy by holding down the lock and unlock buttons on the remote simultaneously until the hazard lights flash. It’s been wonderful, not making the neighbors jump out of their skins every time I lock the damn car, and if I do ever want to confirm that it’s locked, pressing lock twice makes it beep.
Dodge actually makes that a menu option (along with many others that are very intuitive). I don’t know why other manufacturers don’t do this. I am often amazed how much more user friendly the UI on my 2010 pickup is than my wife’s 2017 CR-V.
I’m a construction guy, and would vastly prefer a back-up camera rather than a beeper. Especially on excavators where “backwards” is totally arbitrary.
There is a recycling facility a few blocks from me, and also an Amazon warehouse. The beeping happens 24/7, but irregularly. It’s not the worst noise pollution in the world, and I really don’t want most people run over or run into by forklifts, but I was curious as to how effective these were.
I don’t think the forklift beeps are just for the warehouse workers who become numb to them, but more for people like me who dont go out into the plant daily. When I do get out on the floor I am quite aware of them.
Aren’t you asking to prove a negative? How are we to know how many didn’t happen? Sure, insurance claims might give you a really rough idea, but there is no way to prove the number.
True. I’m not asking for proof, but for ballpark figures, which I assume can be counted by the reduced injuries and deaths. But I have no idea how to find these figures, which is why I posted.
This is interesting because as often as I have seen beeping in the movies (trying to locate a car) none of my cars has ever beeped using the remote. They just flash the lights.
On my car, it depends on which button you hit. Unlock will flash the lights, lock flashes and honks.
Corollary: how useful are reverse beeps inside the car? My spouse’s Prius beeps loudly and incessantly on the inside when it’s in reverse. It’s distracting and stress-inducing any time I’m trying to carefully and slowly back out of a parking space.
I refuse to believe that anyone for whom who this alarm is useful should be driving a car in the first place, and I think it makes me a less safe driver. Like, did the implementation discussion go something like: “when drivers need to focus through a slow and careful process, maybe we can help them out by adding a loud repetitive ‘beep’ while they’re doing so!”
The Prius reverse beep can be disabled. Older models by holding the km/mi while starting (or something like that), newer models has to be done at dealership AFAIK .
Brian
Where I lived in Italy, one of the birds mimicked the garbage truck. Sound and volume, and was quite proud of its ability at all hours.
My Opel Corsa starts to beep when backing up if I get closer than 30 cm to an object in the back or on the sides and the closer you get to it, the frequency steadily increases until it becomes a flat tone when you’re about to hit the object. I find this very useful especially when parallel parking.
ETA: if you don’t like the beeping, it can easily be turned off by a simple switch on the dashboard.
9 years ago Tom Scott made a video about the transition to white noise backup sounds:
The advantages are supposed to be:
Here in the US I have never encountered this myself, and if I heard it I’d probably think the truck was releasing its air brakes, not backing up.
This seemed relevant, but I’m afraid it still doesn’t answer the question.
The local garbage trucks (North Carolina) use a pulsed hissing backup sound, which I find to be much less annoying, and superior because the sound doesn’t travel as far, so it is easier to locate.
Noise pollution takes many forms, not just “ghetto-blasters”.
When I was a truck driver, I did a fair amount of supermarket deliveries. Many of these are in residential areas and had a blanket rule about reversing beeps - that is, they had to be turned off.
The Chelsea Flower Show is a huge annual event on the grounds of The Royal Hospital, Chelsea, London. (The home of The Chelsea Pensioners). As you can imagine there are a large number of trucks and vans, as well as some heavy machinery involved, and in recent years, there has been a total ban on reversing beepers.
In general, I agree with the idea that they serve no real purpose these days.
On a more general point, I read that the equipment in hospitals, often shown in films etc as beeping, has now been silenced on the ground that it is annoying and serves no purpose. An alarm when things go wrong is much more effective.
Beeping or not, you’ve gotta watch out for forklifts.
"A bystander told the forklift operator to stop, at which time “he backed up and most likely ran over her again”
Presumably, beeping was not effective at that point.