Thanks for sharing , Bing and VDCdriver. I didn’t know I would need to check so very often. I put this into practice today. It’ll take me some time to get used to it and subconsciously I should be doing this without needing to remind myself to.
I guess it’s worth taking the defensive class but my sister and brother in law made it sound like it was dreadful, particularly because of the length of time to complete.
Retired fire fighter here. @Clueless33 thanks for trying to be attentive and finding a way to deal with your hearing loss. When we were responding to calls we are trained to look for inattentive drivers, even with lights and sirens the emergency vehicle is responsible to make sure the lanes and intersections are clear. My department required retraining every year. We have seen folks not see or hear us when we were right behind them . Maybe the radio is too loud, the car is well insulated to sound, they have earbuds in or just did not care to move out of the way. One person had pulled to the right along with other cars and felt the need to pull out just as we reached him, fortunately we missed a collision by inches. Another time we had the green light, running lights and sirens and an idiot ran the red in front of us, fortunately the driver (my wife) saw them and was on the brakes hard.
The emergency response community is aware of the issu
es, they try to deal with it by adding high visibility strobes (but this can cause epileptic folks problems) and a very neat siren we call the rumbler, the rumbler will shake the ground and the car in front will vibrate to get the drivers attention.
You are doing the right thing by being aware of your hearing loss and paying attention the best you can
I can only speak about the AARP online course, and other online courses might be different. I think that it probably takes ~4-5 hours altogether, but because it “saves your place”, you can log-out at any point, and start at the exact point where you left-off the previous time. Because I broke it up into small segments over a period of several days, I don’t really know how much time–in total–it took.
And, don’t tell the AARP folks that I mentioned this, but I did other things–like balancing my checkbook, checking email, etc, while some of the videos played. Just hearing the narration in the background while you do other tasks gives you sufficient knowledge to “ace” the test at the end.
The Rumbler® is an expen$ive gimmick.
Only 80 watts, it uses loudspeakers to sound the electronic siren frequency just two octaves lower.
Far better would be if Federal Signal made their Q2b spinning-rotor siren have 4 ports instead of 14.
The frequency would be much lower. Lower frequencies travel farther in air and penetrate vehicles better.
When wife and I heard a fire truck Q siren kept peaked, the steady high pitch did not even sound like a siren. We thought truck brake squeal.
Some people do not hear its peaked frequency.
(As we age, we lose higher frequencies. In my late 20’s I could no longer hear the flyback transformer in a television.)
I’m going to look into the aftermarket device mentioned in the article you provided here.
Thank you.
All great advice but now thanks to Big Government intervention, inexpensive OTC hearing aids are now available and in circumstances where hearing aids are not sufficient, Medicare will pay for Cochlear Implants to restore hearing.
Instead of seeking halfway solutions I suggest you look into real solutions.
Check with a hearing-impaired center/website. They may know of car mirrors available that are better than the ones that came with the car. Some years ago I had a friend who was blind and I drove them frequently to the local “Lighthouse” vision impaired center for ideas and tech product suggestions to help their specific needs. The staff there usually had already run into the issue for the visit and already knew what the available options were.
+1
The Digital rear view mirror on my current car is really great. Because it is somewhat wide-angled, the view from it, coupled with properly-adjusted side-view mirrors–means that there are no blind spots. The best part is that I don’t have to see the head restraints in the back, and I have a perfect view of the traffic in back of me even if I have the cargo area packed up to ceiling level.
There are also aftermarket digital rear view mirrors, but I can’t comment on their quality/usefulness.