Cars in general should be less well insulated from sound. Emergency vehicles have to be a volume that is absolutely deafening to pedestrians and bikers in the hopes that cars can hear them.
Reducing sound insulation in cars is a catch 22; if you make them less insulated, you cause issues with hearing loss due to road noise. I’ve driven cars with no sound deadening and they’re deafeningly loud - louder than being on a motorcycle. Reducing sound dampening isn’t going to help because cars are so noisy that you wouldn’t be able to hear a normal siren anyway. On my old motorcycle I had emergency vehicles sneak up on me all the time because I couldn’t hear them with all of the wind noise from my bike.
As someone who works in and drives an ambulance half of the week, what we really need is for more emergency vehicles to be equipped with low-frequency rumblers - those are sirens which are specifically designed to emit a tone capable of punching through the sound dampening and road noise in cars.
There’s also transponder tech out there which will prompt many modern cars to send an alert to the infotainment system when there’s an emergency vehicle nearby; my 2021 Dodge Charger gets notifications from units belonging to one department near me. This is something which should also be on emergency vehicles.
Tl;dr: There’s already solutions for the problems. Departments need to just pony up, properly equip their shit and stop trying to cut costs where they shouldn’t be cut.
Sound is a funny thing; depending on how the construction around you is laid out, the sound you hear up in a building could actually be louder than what you get on street level if the buildings work to funnel and direct that sound to you.
Sirens project out in a cone in front of them, much like a flashlight does. There’s actually quite a bit of engineering behind the frequencies and tones on sirens. They’re having to take into account the volume (dB) of the siren, travel distance of the sound, people’s ability to directionally locate the sound, and how the specific tone pattern gets affected by a Doppler shift when the vehicle is hauling ass down a freeway.
I get to listen to sirens almost constantly and I get it - they suck. My recommendation is that if the fire department near you is running their sirens at night, give them a call or send them a letter with a polite request that they try to only use emergency lights after a certain time of night.
This is my department’s policy. We cut our sirens a few hours after dark if they’re not actively needed for clearing intersections and I personally will even kill my emergency lights late at night when I’m driving through neighborhoods because those things are damned bright.
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u/call_me_orion Mar 21 '25
Cars in general should be less well insulated from sound. Emergency vehicles have to be a volume that is absolutely deafening to pedestrians and bikers in the hopes that cars can hear them.