We Can Finally Do Away With the Accursed BEEP-BEEP of Heavy Machines – and EVs Too
28th December 2021
One of the most popular articles 15 years ago talked about the problem of the loud BEEP-BEEP sound made by heavy equipment backing up. This sound travels for huge distances and is the bane of everybody who is anywhere near construction, which is a lot of people, a lot of the time. The reason the blog post is popular is a lot of people come looking for solutions.
The noise is there for a reason of course, a large fraction of workplace deaths are people crushed by equipment backing up. Nobody wants to make that easier to happen.
A company called Brigade came up with a solution in 2000 and patented it. Their solution was simple. Instead of a pure, penetrating beep tone, they use a broad spectrum white-noise or pink-noise pulse. That pulse is very obvious to somebody beside the truck, but it fades into the background noise very quickly and so doesn’t travel to people who don’t need to hear it. Brigade also says the tone can be heard better with less energy, and people are better able to determine the direction it is coming from.
Those who first mandated the beep thought it was good that it was annoying and impossible to ignore — and thus went for a distance. Because it “travels” like this, on any construction site (or near one) you are hearing them all the time. You become used to them and even start to ignore them, and that is why people still get crushed.
So, how many years do you think it will take to convince government regulators?