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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to read an analysis of how the world in general has gotten so loud. Even a few hundred years ago, the centers of massive cities like Paris, Rome, or Istanbul must have been significantly quieter, being that cars, horns, trains, speakers, boomboxes, industrial plants, airplanes and everything else that creates noise pollution didn't exist.

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Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to what we recall as a child and inevitably conclude that is has gotten nosier/busier/more polluted, not realizing that environment of our childhoods were already heavily degraded.

The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apart from the sounds of birds and insects. And there would have been very little to 'look' at (no text/decor/branding, few hard surfaces, few straight lines, little color and texture variation). And of course no pollution, and very little to 'do'! So it shouldn't be a surprise to find that the sheer sensory intensity of modern living contributes towards depression and schizophrenia [1].

What is the endgame here?

[1] eg https://www.gwern.net/docs/nature/2010-peen.pdf

I agree with cars being the problem. I only thought about that when I learned that laws were drafted to force electric cars to make noise - for a brief couple of seconds I realised how different the world would be if all cars were silent... and then I got my hopes crushed.

I truly cannot picture what life would be like without car noise and light pollution.

Check out the movie Gattaca for a vision of a future world with silent electric cars.

In the UK at least, there's a good reason behind the law. Electric cars are required to make noise so that visually impaired people know a car is approaching.

They already make plenty of road noise just from the friction of the tires. If visually impaired people can't hear it, then it's likely because of all the OTHER sources of noise pollution around them.

Most of the noise from cars is from the tyres.

How much time have you spent in the woods? It's definitly far, far from quiet. At least where I grew up. Maybe in the dead of the night, but here in the middle of the city, on a Main Street, it is also so quiet in my room that I can hear my la croix fizzing from 8 feet away.

There's lots of different sounds to hear, but on a decibel level it must be quiet in the woods I think.

Some visitors to Copenhagen remark that it's surprisingly quiet for a capital city. Others say it "feels boring", which I think is partly because they associate a noisy city centre (e.g. London or Paris) with fun.

There are far fewer cars in the city centre than most cities the size of Copenhagen; enough roads are restricted to people on foot or bicycles that relatively few people try and drive to, from or through it.

Your comment has just added Copenhagen to my list of "must-visit" cities.

Definitely wait until spring, preferably summer, unless you're attracted to damp weather.

On OpenStreetMap, the pedestrianized roads are marked in a pale blue-grey [1].

They aren't labelled the same way on Google Maps, perhaps because on the smaller pedestrian streets vehicles aren't always completely banned, just strongly discouraged by the signs, surface, layout, and attitude of pedestrians.

The OSM cycle map layer needs a few updates for consistency, but most roads outside the very centre of the city have a separate cycle lane like one of these [2], or else almost no traffic. At school time or weekends I see 5-6 year old children cycling with their parents — other cyclists will overtake more carefully. Older children make similar journeys alone.

The Netherlands is similar. Within cities, the canals lead to some different approaches, and between cities, they provide nice long-distance cycling routes. I think the Netherlands is probably the better destination for a cycling holiday, but the difference between a Dutch and Danish city doesn't matter for a city holiday.

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/55.6802/12.5753

[2] https://ggwash.org/view/43010/copenhagen-uses-this-one-trick...

Traffic in a city where every street is cobblestone and they are traveled by horses with iron shoes pulling carts and carriages with iron tired wheels is not going to be very quiet.

I would expect that the noise was in fact less than modern vehicles but the cities of the past were not full of the quiet sounds of nature that people like to whitewash their imagination with.

Cars, industrial equipment, and things like HVAC systems all play a big role.

Racism was definitely the primary motivator of White flight for the cities, but I also wonder to what extent people just wanted to get away from industrial noise pollution, which surely must have been at a peak during that era.

Woods are not quiet.

I was surprised as an adult how loud squirrels are scampering around the woods.

> The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apart from the sounds of birds and insects.

I wonder if that hypothesis is related at all to hypothesis of bicameralism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

Note: I haven't read the book, so maybe it was covered...

Traffic makes a big difference. I was in Venice recently, and the only noise I could hear was suitcases rolling over the cobbles. It really brought home how much noise traffic makes.

I don’t know. Carriages and wagons with wooden or iron-rimmed wheels rolling over cobblestones don’t seem to me like they’d be quiet.

I said "significantly quieter", not "quiet." Surely a carriage makes less noise than an eighteen-wheeler.

I wouldn't bet on it. The sound of horseshoes on anything hard is really loud. Also: Which horrible place has eighteen-wheelers driving in living areas? Carriages were everywhere.

There are probably a lot more cars on the road than there ever were carriages. I'd also suspect that copious amounts of horse manure on top of the cobble stones have a dampening effect.

Not sure about that, in particular herding animals into the centre of towns and cities to be slaughtered must have been noisy. Also iron horseshoes on stone paving/cobbles were apparently very loud.

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