If you’ve ever ridden in a hybrid car, I’m sure you’ve noticed the peculiar silence when the engine starts, and the way it simply “rolls” onto the road ” but are hybrids too quiet for their own good? Some pedestrians, and particularly blind pedestrians, say that they are.

Jana Littrel, who is blind, had her foot run over by a Toyota Prius while walking through a bank parking lot in the East Bay town of Albany a year ago. Although she managed to avoid injury, Jana says the incident has put her on edge. So far, no deaths or serious injuries have been attributed to hybrids. Still, The National Federation for the Blind is currently working toward getting hybrid automobile manufacturers to install a “noise emitting device” so that blind pedestrians, as well as joggers, children, animals, and cyclists can be made aware of the oncoming vehicle.

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Palm Springs, that jewel of a jetset getaway, is studded with golf courses and swimming pools. It’s also a desert, which is why choosing to locate 120 water-guzzling world-class golf courses there looks like a world-class miscalculation now that the west’s drying up.

Parts of the legendary resort’s Coachella Valley “have sunk more than a foot in a decade as groundwater was sucked up to feed a thirsty economy,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which adds that even as the ground is literally sinking, Palm Spring’s population
“has ballooned by 25 percent in just five years.”

Steven Robbins, the Coachella Valley Water District’s chief engineer, told the Inquirer:

“We have a problem, and we have to deal with it. But our goal is to not have water be a constraint to growth. We don’t want to be the ones to say ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ to growth.”

I guess they’re not really about to run out of water after all; looks like that river we call “de-Nile” runs right through Palm Springs.