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The whole thing was so surreal that it took me a few seconds to register what had just happened. (More on that later.) When I heard the crash and turned around, it felt like it had happened somewhere far away. It wasn’t until I’d reached the other side of the street that it really hit me.<\/p>\n
Pure carelessness on my part, yes \u2014 but made worse by a piece of technology: my headphones. I had active noise cancellation on and, on top of that, I was listening to music. The only reason I heard the crash at all is that the sound of a collision is just that loud.<\/p>\n
My sensitivity to noise is well known to regular readers of this blog. That’s why active noise cancellation in headphones like the AirPods Pro was a revelation. Suddenly, I could walk down the street without getting battered by the roar of traffic.<\/p>\n
Too much of a good thing, though. If I hadn’t muffled one of the two senses you rely on most in traffic, I might have heard the cars coming down the lane I’d convinced myself didn’t exist. I might have prevented the crash \u2014 and my own near-miss.<\/p>\n
This is conventional wisdom, and it’s backed by science \u2014 though, to my surprise, the handful of studies I found are all at least a decade old. (Lichenstein et al., 2012<\/a>, IAG\/DGUV, 2012<\/a>, Mwakalonge et al., 2015<\/a>. If you know of a more recent study, let me know!)<\/p>\n Wearing headphones in traffic creates two problems: they suppress the sound of vehicles, and they pull your attention inward \u2014 toward the music or podcast \u2014 and away from your surroundings.<\/p>\n In a press release, Dekra \u2014 a German company and global leader in vehicle inspection and certification \u2014 shared some updated findings<\/a>. Among them: noise-cancelling headphones are \u201cespecially dangerous\u201d because even at low volume, they slow a pedestrian’s reaction time. My own reaction was delayed enough that I noticed it myself.<\/p>\n The release also flags the growing risk posed to inattentive pedestrians by electric cars, electric motorcycles, and cyclists \u2014 all quieter road users that are becoming increasingly common.<\/p>\n People tend to dismiss safety advice they instinctively feel is overblown. I think that was me, when it came to wearing headphones outside.<\/p>\n Hours after the scare, I caught myself thinking about the chaos that getting hit would have caused. Hospital, worried family, possible surgery, a long recovery, maybe lasting damage. It’s easy to forget how fragile life is.<\/p>\n Since the incident, I’ve swapped my headphones for a passive noise reducer, the Loop Engage. It cuts sound by just 16 decibels \u2014 enough to take the edge off loud engines and heavy vehicles without cutting me off from the world around me.<\/p>\n