The blind pandering to the blind

Local expert explains a traffic safety device
designed to protect the visually impaired.

This snippet from this story about how California is exploring legislation mandating noisemakers on too-quiet hybrid cars pretty much sums up all the fundamental problems with the current state of American government:

Although there apparently are no reported cases of a pedestrian being killed after walking in front of a silent-running hybrid, near misses and minor scrapes are becoming more frequent. According to a story going around Sacto, an unsuspecting Assembly staffer was almost clipped by a hybrid while walking through Capitol parking garage.

In other words, they are inspired to fix something which apparently isn't a problem because someone they know is a drama queen. This is both hilarious and tragic. Hilarious because experts such as one Mr. Bubb Rubb of Oakland, California have already researched and extensively tested devices to protect the blind from silent cars:



This spectacular waste of time and taxpayer money is also tragic because there are legitimate traffic issues that could be solved. In particular, almost 1800 kids are killed annually in traffic related accidents, according to The National Center for Statistics and Analysis (NCSA), an office of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). If all of the effort outlined in that article were applied to keeping kids alive, and if they could manage to reduce that number by even 1%... let me run the numbers here... that would reduce roughly INFINITY more deaths than putting a fucking waterproof car noise speaker on a hybrid car.

I guess children need to hire better lobbyists... or stage a near-miss in front of a staffer in the capitol parking lot. Fuck me. Makes this guy seem much less crazy.