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Comment by mlinksva | Hacker News Reader

I've been idly wondering whether there is a comprehensive "quiet community" standard like there is for a "dark sky community"?

From my perspective the main noise pollution problem is fast moving cars, which have obvious fixes. People loudly hanging out in plazas seem like a more difficult problem, and not even something I'm all that comfortable with characterizing as a problem. But maybe turning down lighting could be part of the solution? Or are places people hang out loudly at already not lighted?

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I'm from Spain and all city streets and plazas have at least some lighting at night (enough that one can comfortably walk through the city at any hour of the night) and even the least lit areas are popular for people to hang out in. I do not think it would be feasible, desirable or safe to reduce lighting to the point where it would be uncomfortable to be hanging out at night.

I might even predict the opposite effect: drinking on the street, although popular, is illegal in Spanish cities. Darker plazas would make it easier to hide drinking from the police, and could attract even more people.

Thanks for the perspective. I'm convinced darker streets/plazas is a non-solution (and note isn't really what dark sky protections are about: it's OK to illuminate down, just not up).

As urban soundscapes go, passenger cars are basically silent. Buses, trucks, trains, and motorcycles all make drastically more noise. Especially when the buses are operating their airbrakes and audible announcements, trains are blowing their horns as they crawl away from stations, trucks are accelerating and decelerating, etc. In other words, I couldn’t disagree more. It’s the slowest-moving everything-except-cars that make an unbearable racket. Maybe this is different in places with more prevalent diesel cars?

I'm living in a German city near (but not directly on) a busy street (as in: lots of cars and tram service every 5 minutes on workdays and every 30 minutes at night). Trams are about as loud as cars, but there are fewer trams than cars, so cars rank slightly worse than trams for me.

The only mode of transportation that's "practically silent" is bicycles. (Pedestrians are silent, too, except for those drunk idiots who like to loudly argue before my house at night.)

> Buses, trucks, trains, and motorcycles all make drastically more noise.

Motorcycles are THE WORST.

> Especially when the buses are operating their airbrakes and audible announcements,

WTF? Announcements happen inside the bus, not outside. (Except if there is a blind person on the platform. They have devices that make the tram or bus announce its destination. But blind people are exceptionally rare, especially at night.)

> trains are blowing their horns as they crawl away from stations

WTF? I only ever see trains blowing their horns when approaching one of the few ungated level crossings in the countryside which have not been outfitted with gates yet.

In the US cities I’ve lived in, announcements always happen outside the bus in case there might be a blind person, and the tracks used by freight and regional passenger service have boom gates, flashing lights, bells, and three blows of the train horn at every level crossing (every few blocks). Those trains still kill pedestrians pretty frequently, so there is little appetite for relaxing federal railway safety regulations. In Chicago, some bus shelters also have continuous beeps whether or not a bus is present to alert the blind to their location.

Interesting. Level crossings between railway and streets within cities seem like a colossally bad idea to me, and I don't know of any in Germany. (Except for trams, obviously. Those operate very differently from railway, and at much lower velocities.)

And I'm surprised that the buses don't adopt the same tech that we have, where blind people carry devices that trigger the announcement.

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