Posted on 01/16/2013 1:12:20 PM PST by nickcarraway
Campaign aims to educate motorists about hearing- impaired drivers
The Roads & Transport Authority (RTA) has launched the ‘Deaf Driver’ initiative to sensitise road users to deaf drivers and alert motorists to vehicles driven by people with hearing disabilities.
“The objective of the ‘Deaf Driver’ initiative is to educate drivers on how to deal with hearing-impaired persons and alert them that the driver in front is deaf,” said Maitha bin Udai, CEO of RTA Traffic & Roads Agency.
“We are therefore compiling a brochure on how to deal with personnel suffering hearing loss. We are also designing a poster to be fixed to vehicles driven by individuals with hearing disability. Readers of this poster will be aware that the driver is deaf and will not respond to alarm sounds made by other motorists,” she said.
Maitha recollected the initiative launched by the Traffic & Roads Agency about hearing-impaired personnel two years ago in collaboration with the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Ministry of Education encompassing an educative bulletin written in Braille distributed to blind students who were integrated in schools.
It also included lectures in sign language for the deaf community members in addition to several visits by traffic awareness teams to autism centres and schools dedicated to children with special needs.
“The aim of the initiative is to educate the public that deaf drivers can drive vehicles like other motorists, but their focus on the road hinges on visual and kinetic perception rather than the sense of hearing. Therefore, dealing with deaf drivers on roads has to be through optical signs,” she said.
“Deaf drivers can’t hear horns by other vehicles or sirens of ambulance, police and civil defence vehicles. They also have difficulty in communicating with others as the hearing impaired person depends on lip movements and hand signs, hence it is important to communicate with deaf drivers through the body language coupled with hand movements,” said Maitha.
>>I do not have statistics to back me up, but Deaf people are usually better drivers than hearing people because Deaf drivers are always constantly scanning the road and using the mirrors. A hearing driver would typically look ahead and miss out on road hazards that a Deaf driver would immediately spot. Not saying that all of this is 100% accurate but this is common knowledge, and freedumb2003, you might want to ask your sister whether this assumption that I made is accurate or not.<<<
You should have stopped you post after the 1st sentence. It takes ALL senses to drive. Period. You can’t wish it away with hand-waving.
>>talk and drive, again - a stupid comment. Are you saying that hearing people don’t do stupid things on the road? <<
The difference is a person, say ME for example, can concentrate on the road (I refuse to answer cell phone calls or use the damn thing while driving).
No amount of work will allow a profoundly deaf (of course I know the degrees) person to hear anything outside of the line of sight.
My example is that I can talk and drive (look at the research, it is a different part of the brain). Deaf people WHOM I HAVE BEEN IN THE CAR WITH WHILE DRIVING cannot physically do the same.
Please read the entirety of my post, which has not even been CLOSE to refuted.
>>Your sister is right! LOL!<<
You betcher bippy! Deaf people who want to perpetuate deafness (remember I said in a generation, not now) are warts on the butt of the body politic.
Driving deaf is the same as driving blind. People with all senses needed to drive can DECIDE to drive with the proper alertness. Deaf people, just like blind people, cannot WILL themselves to perceive important data.
BTW: People who drive while using their cell phones have decided they can also overcome biology and are as dangerous as drunk drivers. But they can DECIDE not to do so.
I note how many of my points you ignored (pretty much all of them). Like my sister, you wave them away with pure emotion.
I’m not Deaf but I do have severe tinnitus. It probably won’t be the last ignorant comment I make here. Thanks for your response.
All right then. Do you have evidence? Enlighten me please. Preferably a link to medical journal would be nice.
Oh really? Then why in all 50 states, Deaf people are allowed to drive? If we were such terrible drivers, wouldn't we be removed from the roads by now? Again, there is no evidence to support your accusation.
>>Oh really? Then why in all 50 states, Deaf people are allowed to drive?<<
The same reason as there are movements in so many places with gun-grabbing legislation underway and illegal aliens can picket in pubic — LOBBYING!
Do I really need to AGAIN spell out the important data that sound imparts? Outside the line of sight?
I looked and the few studies done that show deaf drivers are bad do so much Politically Correct backtracking that they are useless. Like AGW.
Now, please address the substantive issues I brought up:
1) Should deafness be eliminated if scientifically possible?
2) Why am I taxed specially for the deaf?
3) Why do the deaf continue to choose to be deaf if there are possible solutions?
4) Do you pay personally for the supports you get from my tax dollars?
5) Do you pay extra taxes for other disabilities? Drivers for the blind?
6) What is the difference between blind driving and deaf driving? Each subtracts an essential sense needed for the activity.
“I’m all for this. And while we’re at it, let’s do something for the blind drivers as well.”
I have a blind friend, and while he did manage to learn to ride a bicycle around his neighborhood when he was in grammer school - learning how to use echo-location on his own, he knows he cannot unaided drive a car, but he is counting on Google’s driverless car technology to scale that obstacle for him before he dies.
Of course the arrogant geeks at Google want very much for all cars to HAVE TO use their technology someday. For me I have no desire to ever use that technology - ever. Why would I??? I always prefer to NOT be the passenger now!!!
As to the deaf drivers, somewhere is a Liberal politician whose been waiting for this article so they can use it as “grist for the mill” and pull out proposed legislation that all car horns be connected to some sort of light on the car, signaling to the deaf when the horn is being honked. Of course so as to not confuse the “horn light” with any other use of lights on the car, and to make it most visible from any direction, it will demand a center-of-the-roof location for the “horn light”. Tell the car designers to start redoing their “aerodynamic” tests.
“Because deafness isn’t a bad thing. We are not “broken” and don’t need fixing.”
I can vouch for this attitude being pervasive in the deaf “community”. I found this to be the case shortly after going deaf myself many years ago. It is sad because it really does stand in the way of many more people being “cured” than may be the current case. You are right on this point.
As far as your ramblings about running over deaf people and letting blind people drive, I think your sibling vendetta against your sister is getting the better of you. Taking your anger with your sister out on innocent deaf people is not prejudice, but pretty over-the-top statement-wise and does not help you prove your point.
As far as deaf people t-boning fire engines, can you tell us how many times this happens each year? I’m very curious. Can you point to any data that shows deaf people are involved in more accidents BECAUSE of their deafness? I’d like to see that.
>>I’m not Deaf but I do have severe tinnitus. It probably won’t be the last ignorant comment I make here. Thanks for your response.<<
As long as they can feed at the public trough, so-called “Conservative” impaired people will use emotion as a club. Let’s cut the subsidies and we will see how “Conservative” they are.
And let’s ask for objective studies (the last ones were in the 1970s or so) — THEN see the yelling start.
Think about that: No objective studies since the 1970s. And those were challenged in the reports themselves as “flawed” — NONE that I can find studying profoundly deaf — meaning there are NO objective studies at all! (http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/documents/hearing2.pdf and http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/documents/hearing4.pdf)
It always helps to have a good lobby.
I figure I am going to get all us short white guys to change the NBA rules to lower the baskets and tie anyone taller than 5’6” to have to use one arm and one leg. If we can get our lobby large and sympathetic enough we should stand a good chance.
Google has a driverless car. I’ve passed by it a few times on Highway 85. There was a person sitting in the driver’s seat, but he wasn’t driving.
I think it is possible for
the entire universe of the hearing-impaired plus their organizations, plus the non-profits that offer support for them, plus linkages from them all to the technology communities
to develop an instrument/device or a group of instruments/devices that hearing-impaired drivers could obtain for their vehicles that could (a) filter and identify sounds to the point of (b) identifying a “honk” and the direction it is coming from
then it would be up to the marketplace, and non-profit assistance where needed, to make the devices available
if that is not already in whole or in part being looked at
>>As far as deaf people t-boning fire engines, can you tell us how many times this happens each year? I’m very curious. Can you point to any data that shows deaf people are involved in more accidents BECAUSE of their deafness? I’d like to see that.<<
See my post 30 — there have been no studies AT ALL! Now reread the article that started this thread. It says the hearing must now take EXTRA MEASURES to accommodate the hearing impaired (note that profound deafness is deftly ignored).
I am sorry you went deaf. Someday I shall be old and no longer able to drive. I am ready for that day. I won’t have to kill 10 people on a street before coming to that conclusion (also a lobby that lets old people continue to drive without even re-checking their eyesight).
It has nothing to do with my sister, whom I love, but is my favorite sister (in a big family — don’t tell the rest they’ll get jealous). It has to do with the blindness about deafness. And how much it costs us in dollars (and I posit: lives) to turn a deaf ear to it.
Let me turn it around — are you saying that if you had a fire engine running the red with full sirens and you were proceeding with a green light you would notice it in the 20 or 30 seconds a hearing driver would know to slow and pull over? Or hope you will catch the flash of the lights in the 1/1000 a second to take appropriate action as it runs the red?
A quick google search doesn't show anything. Anyway, here's a good article
>>Google has a driverless car. I’ve passed by it a few times on Highway 85. There was a person sitting in the driver’s seat, but he wasn’t driving.<<
If technology lets deaf people be driven about safely I AM THERE!! As I said upthread, I shall eventually get old and unable to drive (around 112 or so but still...). That is what technology is SUPPOSED TO DO! Make life better! Coclear implants are getting better — eventually they will be perfect. USE ‘EM! Prosthetics have become amazing! USE ‘EM!!!
If I am a good man, by the time I fail that annual test after I am, let’s say 70 (which won’t happen and there will be no studies to support people of a certain age tend to be unsafe) there will be a car to drive me home (hell YES I will name it “Jeeves”).
Also within a generation.
I think you've found your calling. What's stopping you from doing something about it?
If I’d known how devisive this would be, I never would have posted it. Can’t we all just get along?
>>A quick google search doesn’t show anything. Anyway, here’s a good article<<
Other than an anecdote that is MUCH less reliable than my very specific example, the opinion of a “hard of hearing” site blog is as useful as an article about obozo on KOS or DU.
Your own research (I did more than you did) reveals what I said — the only tests were done in the 1960s and 1970s, did not deal with profoundly deaf drivers, indicated a higher rate of accidents for hearing impaired but the reports of those reports discredited the methodology. Meaning there are NO reports at all!
Which leaves us with: science and physics. 30 seconds to respond to a critical audio cue or 1/1000 seconds to see an askance visual clue. What does SCIENCE tell you? I will help you with some basics: F=ma. m=delta t over delta s. m=2 tons. Solve for s for delta t being 1:30 and delta t being 1:.0001. You don’t have to show your work.
My father is dead so don't you sons of bitches EVER make a comment of any kind about fathers.
Do you understand me?
Not ONE comment!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.