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New York rolling out noise law, listening tech for souped-up speedsters

thecity.nyc

443 pointsrntn527 comments

City noise pollution is a factor in all-cause mortality due to long-term, barely perceptible stress effects on the cardiovascular system. Unfortunately, one of the most disturbing and frequency sources of city noise pollution is from emergency vehicle sirens.

I gave a presentation at the Audio Engineering Society titled "Iatrogenic Sound", on the tragic irony of how sirens may causally contribute to the heart attacks and strokes that ambulances are rushing to treat.

We were exploring the acoustics of urban design and the sound-design of sirens. The sweeping "wailer" siren is in fact one of the worst possible designs imaginable - all the wrong characteristics for locatability of source, annoyance versus attention ratio, penetration of dwellings etc. Add to that the design of modern "luxury" cars which are soundproofed, fitted with anti-noise and blaring ICE systems to block the world out.

There isn't an easy solution. Most laws give police, fire and ambulance crews "discretion" in the use of sirens. In the UK that's Article 99. But here, the removal of crown immunity and insurance pressures mean the crew now always deploy, even at times of night when it would have previously been illegal under other laws. I expect the same complex spheres of interest clash in NYC too.

You've obviously studied this, but having actually lived in a city center police sirens are actually fairly rare. Despite what you say they rarely sound them at night unless they really have a need, at least in Nottingham.

Much worse for causing often unexpected and very grating noise were:

1. Bin men, especially now they collect glass

2. Diesel black cabs having to put their foot down to get up a hill

3. Taxis idling outside your window waiting for a pickup or just waiting for their next dispatch on double yellows in middle of night

4. Scaffolding being put up or taken down. Incredibly noisy, actually has to be done fairly regularly, many companies illegally do this at the weekend in the early morning as it's a part time job for them

5. Skateboarders, one of the most anti-social hobbies for everyone else around them [1]

I lived on a bit of a hill, which caused 2 and attracted 5.

Since moving to a village again my sleep quality improved overnight. I didn't realize quite how badly it was affecting me.

[1] As it seems to be causing confusion, the anti-social behaviour is against non-skateboarders "Environmental antisocial behaviour is when a person’s actions affect the wider environment, such as public spaces or buildings." https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/asb/...

> 5. Skateboarders, one of the most anti-social hobbies

I hear you - skateboarders skating on the street can be a nuisance sometimes, and yes they make a racket - but that's precisely why skate parks are such a great addition to a community.

That said, calling skateboarding an anti-social hobby is a bit misleading; on the contrary it's a highly social hobby, and in many ways can be socially uplifting.

In the part of town where I grew up, skateboarding gave my friends and I something enjoyable to do, that kept us fit - and crucially - kept us away from other more destructive past-times typically associated with rebellious teenagers (drinking, drugs etc.).

I don't mean to pick a fight here. Just felt it was necessary to better represent skateboarding culture (as a past skateboarder, who owes some of his success to the benefits that hobby provided at a very critical time in my life).

> Much worse for causing often unexpected and very grating noise were:

That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing your list. I think that if everybody contributed a Top-10 noise hate list they would be quite different and quite specific to location, culture and personality.

There is actually a branch of sound psychology on noise "annoyance" that is used in court cases and local authority noise abatement decisions. Although there are common factors like the spectral flux, prominence of high or low frequencies, repetitiveness etc, there are also personal psychological factors, and these dominate.

For example, I live by a skate park. But I like to take my daughter there with her board to (feels like I'm not 50 when I can hang out with the cool kids :), so anyway, I am not averse when I hear kids boarding down my street.

How much noises annoy us is linked to the social identification and sense of how much control or participation we have. For example, if you get on well with a neighbour who has occasional noisy parties you don't mind, because you feel you could ask them to turn it down, or just go and join them for a while. But strangers who never speak to their neighbours are likely to feel threatened and get annoyed. Even though they would probably turn it down if you asked politely these situations can escalate into violence.

Depends on the city, I'm not far from a hospital as well as a police station and the noise it generates is intense. The ambulances more so than the police.

Bikes (mostly mopeds) are really really annoying as well, some of them, I don't know why or how generate insane amounts of noise.

Agreed on the scaffolding and overall works, I blame the random urban planning.

> You've obviously studied this, but having actually lived in a city center police sirens are actually fairly rare. Despite what you say they rarely sound them at night unless they really have a need, at least in Nottingham.

Where I lived in Bristol they were surprisingly common; when I had video calls people noticed and it became a bit of a running gag with my coworkers. Also lots of police helicopters (sometimes in the middle of the night) that kept circling for half an hour or more.

Never had it anywhere else though. AFAIK I didn't live anywhere near a police station, but I think the road near my house was often used to get to the city centre (in spite of not being that large).

Interestingly, I never personally experienced any problems with any of the other issues you mentioned, except cars (not taxis) idling; I often had people stop in the parking lot to make a phone call safely (great!) but they left the engine on for 20 minutes (less great).

> 4. Scaffolding being put up or taken down. Incredibly noisy, actually has to be done fairly regularly, many companies illegally do this at the weekend in the early morning as it's a part time job for them

It's incredibly unlikely that a scaffolder operating in the city, during the weekend, is a part-timer. What you are seeing is the side effect of too much work, too little time, and the natural progression of staging.

Work on one "lift" (one floor height) of scaffolding progresses during the week. The "scaffs" come in on Saturday to raise to the next lift, ready for work to resume on Monday. Your crews are out doing smaller jobs during the week but all come in for a shift on Saturday to knock out a lift on a big site together.

And this isn't illegal. The local authority is responsible for setting guidelines, and those guidelines are used to inform enforcement notices that can prohibit a site's activities between hours _retrospectively if they're found to be excessive_. Excessive is a high bar for an enforcement agent standing 100ft below a scaffolder with a decibel meter trying to hear his impact gun over the drum of a bus rolling past.

The core guidelines are unlimited noisy work 8am to 1pm on Saturday. Work to be "avoided" on Sunday.

The proliferation of speed bumps is also a noise problem. Living on a relatively busy street, it's very clear that they increase traffic noise significantly. Some vehicles/loads clatter as they go over the bump, some drivers brake/accelerate aggressively. A constant speed engine/road noise would be much less irritating. Especially in the early hours of the morning.

If speeding is a problem, cameras would be a better solution. But that would cost more...

I do think it's highly variable by city. People from NYC will talk about hearing sirens multiple times a day (and night), whereas here in Austin I'll go days—often weeks—without hearing one.

I used to live on a pedestrian street used by skateboarders, also containing a glass recycling bin.

Emptying the glass bin was loud, but the noise lasted 5 seconds roughly once per week. I don't care about that.

The skateboarders were a very minor annoyance, and I accepted it as part of living in the centre of a city where there were very, very few residents. The sound was confined pretty much to that single street, unlike vehicle-type noises which seem to travel much further.

all the debate in sibling threads makes me want to put up some mics and some classification system to try and determine what the "answer" is in different cities and areas.

There's definitely noises everywhere, but I recently saw a clip of Paris doing a carfree zone thing and it was _sooooo_ quiet, it makes me think that basically cars are the thing that do most of the damage.

An excellent list, to which I would add barking dogs.

> 4. Scaffolding being put up or taken down. Incredibly noisy, actually has to be done fairly regularly [...]

The fact that it has to be done fairly regularly is not inevitable. It's a consequence of some arguable laws in some cities (NYC for example).

Living in Paris, I can't recall ever being disturbed by scaffolding being put up or taken down. The scaffolding I see generally stays up for months at a time until the work is finished, which means it's only being put up and taken down once. And it's not frequent to see scaffolding.

A big item missing from that list is mopeds (and, to a lesser extent, other loud 2-wheelers, which are less frequent). A lot of food delivery workers use those all day and night round, and they are very loud.

As others have said, someone's list is heavily influenced by where they live. All the items you listed are generally not a big issue to me (mopeds, general ICE noise, honking and random alarms are the main culprits).

Edit: clarification, "ICE" means internal combustion engine here. Electric vehicles are nearly silent at low speed and don't contribute to noise.

In North America I never hear police sirens, even in a noisy metro.

In urban Germany, I could hear them all day.

There's something about the '4 story / narrow streets / high density' that reverberates sounds, there's also something uniquely blistering about their sirens, finally, I think they just put them on for any reason.

Being pulled over in Canada I just see the lights, often no siren at all.

I guess depends on the village. Here there are 2 big noise polluters: agricultural machines and Audi drivers.

>having actually lived in a city center police sirens are actually fairly rare.

Not sure about other cities, however sirens in NYC are a daily occurance. Living in Manhattan, I hear sirens at least once a day minimum. In fact, I just heard a siren while typing up this comment.

Here in NYC, skaters wouldn't surface on my top 50 list of noise sources. I enjoy hearing the lads getting fresh air, and I always stop and wonder at their skills. But vehicles with bad brakes, emitting horrible piercing screeches!

Couldn't disagree more about skateboarding. It's usually just friends hanging out having fun, it's a very leisurely, social past time. It hardly produces any noise, so I have no idea why you've listed it on this thread.

There's nothing wrong with skateboarding, or with a lot of other "layabout" sort of activities. The problem is that people aren't being given public spaces for social activities, leaving them with the choice to do them in a space that's annoying for others or not at all.

Skateboarding, in fact, is one of the least impactful of these activities, which is part of why it's relatively popular - you can actually do it within the confines of the modern cramped city, as opposed to, say, baseball, or frisbee. What do you think would happen if a bunch of kids started playing hockey on a city street?

I’d agree, especially bin men. But as an addition when living in the suburbs, bloody pigeons ‘hooing’ is what wakes me at 5am everyday. They are part of nature, but are the worst for me.

Lived in Nottingham, I beg to differ on the Lenton Blvd side. I would here a siren at least twice a week. However, noise in NYC is much worse and you hear sirens, motorcycles, cars revving, etc. all the time in most large US cities.

The only Nottingham I know is in the UK, and the UK is specifically mentioned by GP.

This claim conflicts with my real life experience.

I lived in SF and the 24/7 sirens of SOMA were unbearable.

I live in the suburbs, and the trash man comes at 3:30am. I kid you not. Drives us crazy.

6. Mopeds

> Add to that the design of modern "luxury" cars which are soundproofed, fitted with anti-noise and blaring ICE systems to block the world out.

The more I learn and think about this, the more it just seems absolutely insane to me how much we have given up for cars. Every horn and siren has to get louder, because the drivers have to hear them. No concern for others though, we must always appease the drivers first. Why can't we remove sound insulation in cars as a matter of policy? It would fix so many issues. Obviously removing most cars from cities would be a step better.

In NYC, police and fire fighters are usually the stereotypical Jabronis who themselves drive the muscle cars and trucks to get to work (and park on the sidewalk outside the precinct). So of course they don't care about the noise they are pumping out on their sirens either. I live near a fire station in Brooklyn and it's truly deafening, even in the middle of the night when there's no traffic.

I'm pretty sure the sirens are just as loud as they are because the people in the completely sound insulated vehicles can't hear them otherwise.

> all the wrong characteristics for locatability of source

Glad I'm not the only one who has noticed this, I thought I was going crazy because in the majority of cases when I'm behind the wheel and I start hearing an ambulance siren I can't honestly tell from where it is coming from. I'm kind of aware of the general area, like it's coming from that general part, or that other general part, but I'm never sure until I actually can see the ambulance itself.

> City noise pollution is a factor in all-cause mortality due to long-term, barely perceptible stress effects on the cardiovascular system.

Source? would appreciate some ammo to advocate for this locally.

I don't have access to my old slide deck atm, but pretty sure a a major WHO report full of links came out the past year or so. See where this leads you [1].

[1] https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/environment-and-he...

Far and away the most reoccurring noise for us is airplanes landing at Bromma Airport in Stockholm, Sweden. Because half of the city is in the descent path, we get low flying commercial airplanes, sometimes a dozen an hour. Incredible how it’s even remotely legal. Especially since most plebs only go to Arlanda Airport, which is an hour away by car. Politicians and businessmen use Bromma.

Second loudest noise is heavy traffic, like trucks. They always seem to be speeding in low speed areas too. I only noticed because my daughter would wake up because of them.

I live in Stockholm and I'm originally from São Paulo, Brazil. Bromma is quite annoying (even more when I lived around Sundbyberg) but is still relatively tame compared to Congonhas airport in São Paulo.

Either way I can't believe that both airports are still allowed to operate, I lived under both on/off-ramps and even though your mind learns to filter out the noise there's something you can still feel under your skin every time a plane buzzes by...

Chicago used to have Meigs Field right downtown, there was a small amount of local passenger service but it was mainly there so wealthy people didn't have to take the El from O'Hare or Midway (or, let's be real, sit in the back while their chauffeur deals with the Dan Ryan).

Daley the Younger bulldozed it in defiance of the FAA, far and away the coolest thing that fella did.

I think there is a relatively easy solution, but it's hard to roll out today. Just as cell phones interruptively broadcast Amber Alerts, car radios should interruptively broadcast emergency vehicle sirens. There should still be an audible siren for pedestrians, but it could be much quieter.

The trick is keeping the broadcast tight, without giving governments the ability to passively track the movements of all vehicles.

UK ambulance and fire sirens are designed for wide open low rise towns. In 40ft wide streets with tall buildings it is physically painful let alone subconsciously stressful.

Yes, sometimes, if trapped between two parallel walls where an emergency vehicle passes, the loudness can be doubled (+6dB SPL) as the reflected waves meet in-phase. This crosses the level causing hearing damage. But because the vehicle is moving we currently dodge classifying this as harm/assault by counting it as a transient rather than sustained exposure.

I'm not sure if there is any substantiated benefit to the extreme volume of the UK ambulance sirens. Coming from a country that also has many wide open low rise towns I've never heard any complaints about the volume of our emergency vehicles.

Central London here. Use of siren is very well controlled in my opinion, especially compared to other countries and cities. I find they're used for short periods such as when approaching an intersection.

What's the most disturbing for us are people on on scooters, motorbikes, or cars with modified mufflers or engines and excessive revving. Much more frequent, and they love cruising at all hours of the night.

Yeah it’s obvious emergency crews in London have been given some very stringent training on the use of sirens.

Only used for a short period on approach to junctions, turned off if it’s clear that traffic can’t create space for them (so they don’t just sit in traffic wailing away), alternating the siren tone after passing each junction so it’s clear to others you need to pay attention again as the vehicle has cleared an obstacle and is going to start accelerating.

They do an extremely good job of making sure that people know they’re there, without being unnecessarily obnoxious.

Definitely this. As someone born in NYC who moved away as a teen and later moved back after a year, the NYC sirens are insanely louder compared to other city sirens. I'm not sure if it's due to the density of buildings, but I think they just set the volume louder. It's incredibly annoying, affects far more people than necessary and could be handled better.

You can always see multiple people plugging their ears when an ambulance goes down a busy street in NYC—it's a painful and resonant buzz in your skull if you don't. The sirens must be well past the level that causes damage.

That's fascinating. What would a good emergency vehicle siren sound like?

Good qualities we identified in a discussion:

- directional

- many short duration rather than continuous

- sonorous (melodic or consonant)

- amplitude appropriate to time of day and danger

A big mistake we make is confusing "attention", "arresting" and "annoying" qualities. Dissonant sounds seem like they grab your "attention" quicker, but that's not necessarily true, it's really about the spectrum morphology in the first 100ms - those sounds (like bells) have better localisation qualities - they tend to elicit an orientation response and have better front-rear ambiguity so we can position them better. Knowing where an emergency vehicle is, is as important as just knowing it's there. From video evidence of interchanges and roundabouts what we see is that the sound of sustained sweep sirens often creates chaos, with drivers panicking, pulling on to pavements or making other rash and dangerous sudden manoeuvres.

Here in Germany, I'm seeing more and more emergency vehicles having their siren off by default in low to medium traffic situations (even in a large city like Berlin) and only activating it when they enter dangerous situations (like large crossings or passing red lights) or need space.

I don't know whether that's current regulation already, but I think it's a rather nice gesture and definitely reduces the noise background ever so slightly.

There is the "European" siren (Martinshorn in German) which is just two tones (typically a' followed by d'') and sounds like [1]. There is also a slightly higher pitched version used by vehicles stationed inside cities.

It's still loud, but subjectively less stress inducing and objectively easier to locate. The most obvious feature is that you can very easily tell if the emergency vehicle is moving towards you or away from you as well as the approximate relative speed because the doppler shift is really easy to pick up by ear.

1: https://freesound.org/people/DominikBraun/sounds/459880/

It would sound more like broad-band static. That kind of sound is much easier to localize, so it doesn't have to be as loud. They would need to mix in a bit of siren sound so you can distinguish it from a backup alert.

Whoooooeeeeew, whoooooeeeeew, whoew, whoew, whoew, whoew.

It already exists in the form of silent flashing blue lights. Anyone who hasn't already seen these lights approaching will usually panic when they suddenly hear a loud siren and become more of an obstacle than if they just carried on moving forward as normal.

I see this scenario played out every weekend when I visit a friend who lives near a busy intersection of two major routes. Emergency vehicles impede their own progress nearly every time by deploying sirens.

>blaring ICE systems

Internal combustion engine?

In Car Entertainment

Exactly

Can you show your data? While noise pollution is self-evidently unpleasant, not providing numbers when claiming a connection between heart disease to, well, anything at all, seems a bit... lax.

If you're interested in this you need to search under the terms:

psychoacoustics of subjective loudness perception, annoyance, sound and attention, arresting sound, sound localisation/directivity or spatial audio in exterior acoustics. These will give you a measure of the breadth of this research field. For health effects you can start with the WHO or IOA (institute of acoustics) searching under cardiovascular effects of long term exposure, accumulative harms or exposure, and noise harm metrics respectively.

I used to live next to a high school.

Every Saturday, starting at 8am, they would have an athletics meet. Whistles, starting guns, announcements over megaphone. I wish that was illegal

Having lived in city centers my entire life, if you had asked me to write a top 10 list of worst noise pollution sources, sirens wouldn't even make the list.

Does getting used to the noise still affect people on a subconscious level? A family member has a newly built fire department and it used to alert me every time I heard the siren, but now I rarely notice. I was curious how that affects people living there in the long term.

You can do something about stress: Ashwagandha reduces cortisol levels. This is not an ideal solution, you should still do something to fix/remove the stressor, but it's better than nothing for sure.

Source please. This is an unsubstantiated medical claim.

(Partner is a medical writer. Don't make claims that you can't back up!)

I have lived in nyc for a long time both in manhattan and Brooklyn. I have never understood how these cars and bikes are allowed to roam the streets like they do openly all day and all night while police used to be so quick to arrest youngsters who jumped turnstiles or smoked weed. The asshole in the article that is quoted even has the courage to say things like they need that sound for safety of themselves and cars and pedestrians. It's 2022, ban these cars and loud bikes from city streets. Heck ban all the unnecessary cars in city centers and just use electric vehicles. The city belongs to pedestrians, not some "tuff" redneck gang who think they can do whatever they want.

If you lived in Brooklyn, you'll know the main source of noise is not these cars, it's groups of people blasting music on the street and barbecuing. They last for hours. When July comes, the main source of noise is people having fun with firecrackers. They are fired throughout the night for weeks.

So yeah, this is great, but the real noise sources are harder to address, because they involve approaching a whole group of people, not a lonely person in a car.

I don’t know where you live in Brooklyn but it’s a big borrow. My neighborhood is full of childish drivers with crappy modified exhaust systems that simulate the sound of an exotic super car burping/farting/backfiring into the wee hours of the morning. I would gladly welcome some kind of regulation on that.

I live close to a park where bbq parties go rampant on weekends. They are annoying and loud for sure and it also makes my trip to the playground with my toddler pain. I totally agree with that. Still that does not affect us in the same way these bikers and cars do in our neighborhood. These people want to scare people. That's their primary goal. They enjoy seeing people jump and start.

I don't get the push to legalize fireworks the last few years.

From about June to August all you hear is mortars. Boom. Boom Boom. Drives dogs insane, wakes up children, it's terrible.

Oh, they are only legal during the 24 hours around the 4th of July and New Years-how do you even enforce that? New Years is just a 2 hour gun shooting session anyway...

You're forgetting to mention the sound of the above-ground subway train that roars by all the second floor apartments every 15 minutes all day and night long, shaking the houses as it goes by. It's ironic they would make a law about noise when the loudest noises are coming from the trains, not the cars.

> The city belongs to pedestrians, not some "tuff" redneck gang who think they can do whatever they want.

the city, any city belongs to everyone, pedestrians, “redneck gang”, etc

Where is this redneck gang coming from? Rednecks are typically southerners, and definitely don’t live in a city. I should know, 1/2 my family are rednecks.

The crime that gets prioritized is the crime that's easy for police. Turnstile jumping? Weed? Basically harmless, but really easy for a cop to ring up some numbers and say he's keeping the city safe.

What makes these crimes easier? A traffic violation only requires the license plate?

I have never understood how these cars and bikes are allowed to roam the streets like they do openly all day and all night while police used to be so quick to arrest youngsters who jumped turnstiles or smoked weed

Because giving chase to vehicles presents a huge public safety danger on city streets. Unless you're talking about a suspect of a major violent crime, especially when the infraction suggests drag racing tendencies, the police in many jurisdictions are very limited from pursuit.

You don't need to give chase, just note the license plate and look up the owner it's registered to.

I have no frigging clue why these biker jerks aren’t deafened by their own noise, when they manage to give me a start from a hundred yard away every single time.

They are young and only get a couple of hours of exposure per day so they can do that for a few years before they're completely deaf.

What I also haven't seen mentioned is the ear-shattering beeping that is required from commercial vehicles as they back up. It is basically a non-stop cacophony of overlapping, deafening beeps as trucks, vans and buses jockey for position and parking spots.

Uh huh, yeah, it's the "rednecks" who are jumping turnstiles and smoking weed and blaring loud music. Sure.

> I have never understood how these cars and bikes are allowed to roam the streets like they do openly all day and all night while police used to be so quick to arrest youngsters who jumped turnstiles or smoked weed.

With the crime wave NYC is experiencing, is there not more important crimes to focus on?

I’d prefer to put up with mild annoyances than seep ever more into authoritarianism. Yes the guy is a dick, but you’re blowing it way out of proportion.

Honestly quite sick of the ever more sterile, dull, and gentrified cities we inhabit (I live in London).

Pollution limits aren't authoritarianism. Toxic fumes and noise are both significant and harmful externalities, and the "free market" is really bad at curtailing externalities like these.

This might be dull and boring to you, but that's probably because these externalities do not significantly affect you. If you want to seek (loud and dangerous) thrills you have almost unlimited opportunities today to pursue them.

I find it amusing that people purposely move into dense urban cities, then complain about all the noise. Like what did you expect? It's endless random fragments of new sounds. People have different tolerances for what is "annoying".

The most Onion bit of news I've seen is NIMBYs who buy condos next to a music venues. Then complain/litigate about noise till it gets shut down.

I’m really excited about this. I live in the NYC area and I think noise pollution from vehicles is an under-appreciated problem. I think the worst impact from street noise is on sleep; even a bit of noise noticeably hurts my sleep quality.

I thought about this recently. I'm occasionally woken up by souped-up cars in the early hours of the morning. You can hear them from maybe from a mile away. They must wake up hundreds, even thousands of people on late night joyrides. It's incredible that it's legal. Why allow something which is entirely pointless to cause such mass public nuisance?

Yes, happens frequently to me in my area of Queens. Especially on weekends. Often, it's difficult to go back to sleep. A day of productivity lost for me and probably many others for no particular reason. It's kind of a tragedy. I once commented on it in the neighborhood FB group, only to receive a cascade of "get over it" and "Karen" comments. It's amazing to me how few New Yorkers are aware of the effects of noise. And then there's the honking. Every day, on a quiet neighborhood morning, at least one person will feel the need to make their displeasure at having to briefly stop known to hundreds of people. It's the main reason I can't live in NYC full time. Not sure what it would take to get anyone to care, but it seems that it'd require such a large cultural shift as to be almost impossible to change. Even NYPD use their siren through almost every intersection for no particular reason.

I think part of the issue is that there's a wide distribution of sleeping sensitivity. I'm a very light sleeper, and I find that a bad night sleep can ruin an entire day of work. Which is partly because I write for a living, which I really can't do well when I'm groggy. But for how many people are those two things true? I don't think many. A lot of people aren't light sleepers, and a lot of light sleepers aren't fazed by a bad night of sleep.

What about police helicopters, which are out every night for hours at a time.

They are very very loud and will wake you up from even a deep sleep.

I've never heard a police helicopter at night in the country where I live (UK). I rarely see or hear them at all.

Edit: After googling, it looks like there are about 2000 police helicopters in the US, but only 20 in the UK. As far as I can tell, there are the same number of police helicopters in LA as across the whole of the UK.

>It's incredible that it's legal.

That depends on the jurisdiction. In NY it sounds like it's already illegal, and this new law will be stricter.

> It's incredible that it's legal. Why allow something which is entirely pointless to cause such mass public nuisance?

It’s actually already illegal. Most cities have noise ordinances that forbid sounds produced above a certain dB level. But like most cities there’s more important criminals to catch.

Toronto did a big report on expanding its island airport to accommodate Cseries jets (currently can only handle q400 turboprops max).

The noise study found the loudest noises were loud cars/motorcycles which were quieter than the jet’s predicted noise. Of course the city did nothing with that finding about vehicles.

Do you have a link to the study? My understanding from the material I saw at the time was that the C-Series jets were quieter than the Q-400s, and the 'real' objection was having any airport on the island at all.

The island folks are always against the airport’s existence, but their opinions really shouldn’t count for anything. They are have the best deal on real estate in the country.

I was ok with the jets until I realized it would require lengthening the airstrip inside the harbour. This would further block water access as the restricted area would also be extended even further into the harbour affecting the ferry routes and other uses including recreation. I am ok with the airport, but I will always be opposed to infilling the harbour. Besides loud cars, the streetcars can make god awful screeching with their trucks going around rail corners. ORNGE air ambulances are bloody noisy too, but I’ll never complain about them.

IIRC some lake users (especially sailors and paddlers) had “real” objections to it on the basis that it would create less usable lake easily accessible from downtown. Granted, it's a much smaller group than would benefit from the airport.

(I count myself in that group, but I was mildly pro-expansion on the basis of having less reasons to go to Pearson.)

Here you go, pg 16 for the noise study: https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/9936-porte...

The Cseries was to be up to 1db louder than q400s, but people may find jet noise less annoying than a warbling turboprop. This study predated the actual flight tests as I understand it.

Why would the city do anything about the vehicles? They'd lose their scapegoat if they did that.

Well they denied the airport expansion and have still done nothing about loud vehicles.

I think it equally affects quality of life during non-sleep hours though as well. The incessant horn honking, blaring music and the straight pipe folks actually make walking down the street unpleasant. The sad thing with the horn honking is that the people in the others cars that they're honking at have their windows up, air conditioning and stereo on. They likely can't hear it enough to be bothered by it. The people that pay price are the walking pedestrians i.e they very people who are not contributing to the very traffic problem these people are stressed about. What's the point in a walking city when the walking has been ruined by people in cars.

That’s what I love about living in the Netherlands. Walking around isn’t ruined by cars because there aren’t any cars allowed in most of the city. If you want to go somewhere in the city, you walk or bike. I walk pretty much everywhere within 2-5km and bike or drive beyond that. It’s usually a pleasant walk, especially this time of year with the flowers blooming.

When visiting the states, I’ve often found it dangerous to walk anywhere. Even just half a mile to the grocery store will involve walking on some high speed road with barely a sidewalk, half-abandoned acres of parking lots, and people driving who have zero respect for people walking.

Well said, this always bothered me

There's a growing body of evidence to suggest that persistent noise pollution leads to cardiovascular disease. One example:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-021-00532-5

This makes wonder. I recently moved to the middle of a loud city, so I bought a pair or bose sleepbuds that drown everything out by playing background noise while I sleep - the sound of waves, actually. Is this low-level sound any less of a stressor than traffic, though? It's constant and calming so I fall asleep. But maybe it's not good for me, and leads to lower quality sleep anyway.

I’d highly suggest trying earplugs if you haven’t. The ones I use reduce sound by 33dB which is quite considerable.

They aren’t strong enough to block out my neighbor having a loud party, but it can block out pretty much everything else. It’s hard to sleep without them anymore.

Can it be timed to cut off the sound after some pre-set time has passed?

Living it, I am not at all surprised. It has grossly elevated my baseline feeling of stress.

I lived for a few years in "Orange, California". Every night around 11pm the loudest motorcycle you could imagine would come by.

I could handle the noise, but when the wife and I had a kiddo who was a light sleeper-- our lives were hell for a 18 months or so.

Imagine, having a newborn and a motorcycle drive by emitting 110db of noise against her windows 5 nights a week, for a year.

If I had murdered this person I would have been, "the bad guy."

> If I had murdered this person I would have been, "the bad guy."

Is this a joke? I know it seems like it’s obviously a joke, but I often see Americans say things like this with total sincerity, so I feel like I should check

Not the OP, but noise-induced stress situations can make you feel and believe in really nasty things in that particular moment, things that otherwise one would hold as being very bad.

For example I often think of throwing some tomatoes or potatoes on the heads of the motorcycle guys who are doing their thing at 12 at night just in front of our block of apartments when summer comes (I live on the 8th floor). I know that that is illegal and that, most probably, doing that gesture could cause bodily harm to those motorcycle riders, but given the situation (lots and lots of noise that invades my personal space) that's the only thing that I can honestly think of at that particular moment.

I'm European, btw, and we live in Bucharest close to one of the busiest and nosiest intersections in this city (and, I dare say, on this continent, as Bucharest is one of most traffic congested cities in Europe).

...lots of stressed new parent are inches-away-from-killing stressed. I imagine that in places like the US with prevalent gun ownership the regular punch-some-annoying-coworker-or-bystander-in-the-face can easily turn into something else.

Lots of people are pre-programmed to not be very far from deploying lethal violence against people around them... don't just assume that if you're not one of them you're not surrounded by at least one or two like us... we may satisfy our urges by hunting or whatching snuff or high-violence gaming or whatever, to each his own, but... be careful :)

Of course its a joke. It's a reference to a "The Simpsons" episode where the comically evil "Mr Burns" jokes that he wants to murder someone for some mundane reason. I can't find the scene on youtube.

I’m in NYC as well. I hate the noise from the Motocross dirt bikes and atvs that folks ride around on streets speeding and doing tricks on in the city. It used to be a problem primarily in midtown but it’s spread since they started cracking down on them. I hope this new tech helps limit those groups.

Chicago currently has this problem [1].

Summers bring out crowds of very loud motorcycles that are so large they block intersections for minutes at a time.

Other smaller groups of motorcycles perform tricks or go very fast (like, don’t see them coming and suddenly they’re 100m ahead fast) on Lakeshore Drive.

Of small note, there’s drag racing that occurs late at night on Lower Wacker.

I guess all these groups are having fun but as a pedestrian and driver it feels dangerous and unnecessarily loud.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/otohi5/motorcycles...

Posting this because it increased my quality of sleep (life) a lot: wax earplugs. Regular earplugs are uncomfortable as hell and really hard to sleep in. The wax ones are perfectly comfortable and work better. I had to start using earplugs when I met my now-wife because she snores quite a bit. The wax ones were a life saver after a year of really uncomfortable regular ones.

I recommend the mighty plug brand (I have no affiliation)

Isn't part of the problem in NYC the sheer number of hard surfaces reflecting sound, i.e. skyscrapers?

Well the buildings are there and will continue to be. Foliage and other dampening would obviously be welcome, but insofar as it’s smart to target easily solvable portions of a problem before the hard/impossible to solve portions, no the buildings are not really relevant.

I visited Copenhagen a while ago and one of the most remarkable things was how _quiet_ it was. Or rather, what I could hear. People talking, birdsong, passing bicycles, and just.... life. It hurt to leave.

I still remember standing outside with my finger in my ear shouting in to my phone just barely able to hear people walking around in cities in California.

Notjustbikes does a great video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8 - "Cities Aren't Loud, Cars are Loud"

I visited California a while ago and it struck me just how loud everything was.

The thing that really blew my mind was how cars honked when you lock/unlock them. Here they're usually silent or a short chirp. I thought people in the car park were just constantly honking their cars for some reason, then I locked mine and was shocked.

>The thing that really blew my mind was how cars honked when you lock/unlock them. Here they're usually silent or a short chirp. I thought people in the car park were just constantly honking their cars for some reason, then I locked mine and was shocked.

Yeah I noticed this as well, it seemed utterly insane. Here in the UK using a horn at night is illegal at night in built up areas [1] yet here you can't help but use it when locking a car which is normally at home in a built up area...

1. https://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/answers/when-is-it-illegal-t...

We've banned car traffic at certain times and places in New York, mostly since the pandemic, and it's remarkable how much quieter those streets became.

It's not just noise. It is far too common to hear (and then see) a huge group of motorcycles and quads, just revving up down avenues in NYC, running through red lights, zipping between cars and most frighteningly going over sidewalks. They will run over someone sooner rather than later, if they haven't already. I don't know why NYPD is not doing anything about this.

It's gotten marginally better whenever the NYPD set up traffic stops and impounded all of their ATVs and other street illegal vehicles. But it requires a lot of manual intervention and it doesn't seem to get the attention it deserves. I look forward to this sound meter being implemented everywhere. Noise pollution has seriously affected the quality of my life in this city.

How is living in NYC? From someone who only knows NY from TV. Is it like its portrayed?

>I don't know why NYPD is not doing anything about this.

I don't know why you're saying this while commenting on an article about NYPD doing something about this.

It's enforced by DEP. NYPD has no involvement.

They haven't and they aren't.

About motorcycles on sidewalks? Did we read the same article?

I don't know why you're sassing when it's long overdue.

There is a lot of "work-to-rule" in the NYPD; when they resent the mayor or the people of the city, even things like murder clearance rates plummet, much less crimes like these.

I’m a bit shocked by the huge volume of “racing through heavy traffic and red lights” videos that I see coming out of the US right now. It seems to be a major new YouTube genre. I haven’t seen it once for any other country

Check out "Ghost Rider" from Sweden, probably the most notorious illegal stunt rider on the planet.

It's pretty shocking for us, too.

As someone who watches such videos, they come from all over the world. The US just has a huge population and the videos you see are in English. Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey, Spain, Russia also have lots. They've also been around for a long time

The NYPD is fine approaching a single person in a car and telling them they are too loud. It's safe and it's easy money. They don't want to approach 50 guys in motorbikes to fine them.

A parade of these motorcyclists stopped traffic to a halt (running reds, going backwards on the street, going between cars so they couldn't move) in Times Square last week. I was in a rush trying to get an important appointment and was furious just standing there, waiting for them to finish their joyride while tourists clapped and took pictures. There were at least 4 NYPD officers within eyesight, but what could they do, shoot someone?

I don't know why California doesn't crack down on nuisance noise, especially from obnoxious cars more. It's an easy source of revenue and a quality of life problem that no one citizen will ever have the influence to have enforced, but many, many would appreciate.

It's like some people, for some inexplicable reason, revel in making their cars loud. And we all have to enjoy it at 2am.

A lot of it is bad urban design.

Traffic calming measures to keep cars slow such as narrow steets and roundabouts can do a lot.

It shouldn't be physically possible to travel at highspeed through residential areas.

the noise is mostly from cars driving intentionally slow in a very low gear or doing pointless short distance accelerations in low gear.

This is not correct.

No amount of “traffic” control is going to prevent assholes from revving it in neutral.

These people are just bad actors that need to be cited.

Some cities by the ocean have enacted similar ordnances. I know at least one in my county does enforce this.

Do you know why it's specifically coastal cities?

Reason is sadism, they like attention first off, and they like molesting passerby with their machine, and they like telling themselves they're superior for making all this noise.

And to vindicate, when public speaking a microphone with speakers does feel cool. So there's some innate human trait.

Fortunately, loud vehicles are getting out of fashion (from what I've noticed at least). Especially when people realize that the noise is completely faked and there's nothing "natural mechanical sound" about it.

> Especially when people realize that the noise is completely faked and there's nothing "natural mechanical sound" about it.

Please explain. The noise is most definitely not fake.

Good. Lived in cities for 10+ years before living back to Ohio and the city noise from obnoxious vehicles is unbearable.

Asked some cops in SF once why they don’t fine/ ticket people with ridiculously loud motorcycles and they were utterly confused. Responded “uh, because they’re cool?”

It's not a city-only thing, the loudest place I've ever lived was a tiny town in Appalachia which (like everywhere in Appalachia) was on a hill, and motorcycles and trucks would deafen us at all hours as they revved up the hill. Over a decade of my childhood was spent being woken up every hour of every night because of inconsiderate jagoffs defeating their mufflers, and cops who didn't give a damn. Ironically, I moved to a city and it's far quieter.

It’s a land area thing. Move to a small town where everybody’s crammed together, or move to a big city where everybody’s crammed together. Go to the country where everybody has a mile between them, that’s what they mean by out of the city.

That’s a great point I hadn’t thought of! Loud motorcycles and cars are so irritating to almost everyone, and would be pretty simple for cops to ticket (they’re on the empty roads with the cops at night and are by definition easy to detect). It makes sense that the cops are similar types of people (a-holes) who understand the motivation.

Or maybe it’s because there’s not enough police officers to cover every area? It’s a pretty common problem in the US, and was made worse in some places with the whole defund the police movement.

It’s because a lot of the people with loud motorcycles are cops or former ones.

I was born and lived in a small town in Italy for the first ~30 years of my life, with small breaks in Rome, Los Angeles and a few others. Then lived in Luxembourg, Singapore (two years each), and 9 years in San Francisco.

The noise in San Francisco was terrible. You could hear the highway at all times, and of course you could hear the trash truck 3 days a week, usually twice in the same night (1am or 2am, and 3am or 4am - how DUMB). My sleep quality, you can guess, was pretty bad. I bet I lost 1-2 years of lifespan just for this. I'm not kidding, and please do not assume I'm exaggerating either. And then of course the occasional gunshots (once or twice a year - I lived in the Mission district), of the frequent police or firefigthers sirens.

It often felt like VIOLENCE. A first world problem, yes (especially when considering that you are surrounded by homeless people) but violence nonetheless.

For the past 1.5 years I've been living mostly in Venezia, Italy. (you can call it Venice, I found that sometimes when I say Venice, without "Italy", people assume Venice in Los Angeles. What a dumb thing).

Venice is incredibly silent. You can occasionally hear a motor boat, but that's it, maybe with just a few contained exceptions (Campo Santa Margherita at night, where lots of youngsters gather to drink and make quite some noise).

I love it. I think you can fully understand only if you have lived for a long period in the countryside. Otherwise, it's really hard to understand the positive impact of a silent city, and a silent night.

New York will never be like Venezia, but I bet they can improve things a lot.

I had the same experience as you living in a room facing the street in SF in the mission. I still have a form of PTSD from the motorcycles coming down our street at 3AM, people blasting music out of their modded cars, fireworks at the same hours, etc. I’m feeling stressed just thinking about it. I felt like I was being assaulted nearly every evening and it started to feeling like real violence like you mentioned. That experience made me really bitter about how areas of American cities are constructed around motor vehicles with zero enforcement of noise ordinances if they even exist. It also made me really bitter towards motorcyclists with loud tailpipes in general. Just a disgrace all around and a real societal failure for someone even slightly noise sensitive.

Much of SF is annoyingly loud, but much of it isn’t. The Outer Richmond can be super peaceful, so can parts of Noe Valley, and in Diamond Heights I could hardly believe I was in a city. Just to name a few places I know; there are plenty more. The noisiest place I lived there was 19th and Mission but even then, you couldn’t hear the highway.

If you hate noise at night but want to be in San Francisco it’s totally doable, but you might not have a neighborhood bar or a walkable BART station.

Venice is of course a special case: banning cars and motorcycles can get you a special kind of quiet. But aren’t the crowds of tourists annoying?

Roll out the laws, 'cos this got stupid quick.

I just googled it because I knew there was a purpose, and there was… it's called 'anti-lag' and it's a way of kicking the turbocharger into super-high RPMs through letting the exhaust explode with unburned gas. I remembered it from the launch of highly tuned rally cars, and it's a real thing, though it's a racetrack thing… I thought. And it's a turbo optimization thing.

Nope! Apparently now they do it on NA aspirated cars where it's about as useful as trucks rolling coal.

Even on turbo cars it's not NICE, but to tune NA cars this way is just ridiculous. Roll out the laws. This is deeply stupid.

Knowing a hell of a lot about cars, both naturally aspirated and turbocharged, this comment just says a lot of gibberish.

Anti-lag, or spooling, is an attempt to launch the vehicle with some boost built. Because in a turbocharged car you don’t build boost until enough exhaust gas goes through the exhaust turbine. An NA car will build no boost this way, as there is nothing to build boost. They are simply launching in their power band.

The unburnt exhaust gas callout is also interesting. This is called running rich, and is a problem. Nobody specifically wants to run richer than they need to, and won’t have much unburnt fuel if if they’re tuned right.

The funnier part is, some turbodiesel and small displacement turbo gasoline engines already do in manifold burning to keep turbos spinning during gear changes, however they're tuned for city environments and it's neither noisy, nor popping.

As you've said, the thing in the article is done just for the "cool factor", which is doubly bad.

Also, motorcyclists' mental gymnastics about loud pipes are just unbelievable.

As a new motorcyclist rider, loud pipes do not save lives, they just piss people off.

I live in Cyprus. The previous apartment my family lived in was 215 meters from an avenue that the motorcycle imbeciles raced on. End result: I had to run the AC all through the night, every night, from May until October, just so I could keep the double glass windows closed. That was the only way to avoid being woken up 4-5 times per night.

It was still uncomfortable to sleep because at night the outside temperature goes below the set point of the AC so the compressor switches off and the room gets humid. You can lower the set point to keep the compressor running all through the night to pump out the humidity but that would increase my power bill significantly. I was already paying a fortune just leaving it on like that.

It's too dangerous for the police to stop them while they are racing, and they don't even have license plates on. They should just get them when they are parked.

I may be being slightly too misanthropic when I say this, but I'd just string a nice long steel wire across the street they race on so they decapitate themselves :)

Hopefully you get charged with murder. We’re getting to see all the people with mental issues in this thread.

Good, we need to crack down on these idiots.

Cracking down on people pressing their horns is far more important IMO.

First step would be regulations requiring the horn be mounted inside the car.

The number of American dash cam videos I see where the driver holds down the horn for more than 10 seconds is quite incredible

Horns are the stupidest thing ever. They have absolutely no positive value. And they keep getting louder because the people who hear them and are supposedly supposed to hear them are stuck in air conditioned enclosed cages so the only sufferers are the people who live in the area.

Horns should be illegal. It’s har side me to understand how stupid we are as a species that we think horns are ok.

> On top of that, the city’s noise code specifies that cars of 10,000 pounds or less aren’t allowed to make sounds that a person can hear from more than 150 feet away. For heavier vehicles and motorcycles the distance is 200 feet.

That seems ill-defined. You can hear a bicycles tires rolling on pavement from 200 feet away on a quiet windless morning.

If you think that is bad, the city adjacent to where I live says that no one shall produces a noise someone else finds offensive. This could preclude breathing in your own home, if your neighbor had sensitive enough hearing.

If you're in the US, that sounds ripe for a first amendment challenge.

You would think this would be a huge incentive for car manufacturers to speed up the deployment of EV’s.

It sucks. I’m a car guy, I like things that go vroom, but when everyone is revving their engines and capping their RPM’s like it’s Need For Speed, I’ve turned into my father (keep it down!).

I recently spent some time in Stuttgart in an area dominated by EV’s, and lots of them. You know what I did’t hear? Them.

I’m a fan of Tesla. I like that more car companies are getting on board with EV’s.

I don’t like being stalked by one. They need a little bell or some sort of noise so I know they are coming. Even if it’s just an electric engine whine. Give me something more than just rubber tires over asphalt.

If a city were to enact an EV only policy, noise pollution would probably plummet.

I don't think EVs are required here. The vast majority of new ICE cars are reasonably quiet. The problem is almost 100% related to motorbikes and modified cars.

> I don’t like being stalked by one. They need a little bell or some sort of noise so I know they are coming. Even if it’s just an electric engine whine. Give me something more than just rubber tires over asphalt.

In the EU at least there’s already a regulation for this:

https://ec.europa.eu/growth/news/electric-and-hybrid-cars-ne...

EVs emit a sort of musical tone at lower speeds. Although in practice it’s still not noticed by pedestrians. It must be a tough balance to get right, noise pollution on the one hand, pedestrian safety on the other.

That's starting to happen in different parts of the world. Probably Oslo is a bit ahead of the curve here. Sales of ice vehicles are ending there in 2025 and already less than 20% of overall vehicle sales in Norway. Of course as a city it is a bit provincial compared to bigger cities elsewhere in the world.

Amsterdam is not far behind with electrifying vehicles or outright banning them from the city. Much of the Netherlands is easily reached on a single charge. People moan about battery range regardless. But it's a bit like complaining about the weather. They vote with their wallets in the end. A lot of leased cars for business use are already electric. The value proposition for the leasing companies is just better. And the companies that pay them like being green. It's not really a choice anymore. Privately owned vehicles is a different matter. Mostly these are second hand vehicles and there just aren't a whole lot of second hand EVs yet.

In much of western Europe, it's no longer a given that you will even be able to drive ICE vehicles into cities. Restrictions are coming. And even if it is allowed now, it's not certain to stay that way. People are starting to factor that into their purchasing behavior. Another thing is the second hand value of ice vehicles. What's the value of a second hand ICE car going to be in five years when they will be banned from a growing number of areas?

China is an interesting case. It has hundreds of electrical car companies and mostly they serve the domestic market. Owning and buying ice vehicles there requires permission, which is a lengthy process to get. A few of the bigger manufacturers are starting to become export to Europe and the US this year. Tesla is nice and a clear leader (even in China), but xpeng, nio, and others are not far behind in terms of quality, volume production, etc. And they are coming to foreign markets.

Right now EVs are mostly expensive luxury vehicles. However, there are very few technical limitations that prevent the creation of a 10K$ EV. China has a few on the road. Cheaper than that even; below 5K$ even. Mostly this is just a function of limited battery supply and insatiable demand at the high end. Why sell a 5K$ vehicle when you can sell a 50K$ one? It's like printing money. Not a choice really. Manufacturers will go for the big luxury cars every time. This will change rapidly as more production capacity comes online and the high end market gets saturated.

The only vehicle sound I notice day to day is the god awful reversing drone of my neighbors Tesla backing into their driveway. I believe this sound was specifically engineered to be as repulsive as possible. Give me a rumbling (muffled) V8 over that any day of the week.

I own 2 (muffled) V8s and a Tesla. I have only ever been mocked for the Tesla reverse drone.

Mandatory video to watch on this topic:

Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

> “Amplified volume is imperative to keep us safe” when riding motorcycles

oh dear, that old argument again

> But Pennachio conceded he has modified four of the 11 cars he owns to enhance the rumbling of the engine, as a matter of pleasure, not safety. “Just to know you’re in a beefier man’s car,” he said

well, we quickly got to the real reason

As a motorcyclist with really loud exhaust pipes:

"Loud pipes save lives" is nonsense. When a driver is concentrated on visual stimuli, has his windows up and music playing, there are no pipes loud enough to make him notice me.

Why loud pipes then? Because it's so much fun to open the throttle wide and hear and feel the roar vibrating through the bike and myself! Makes me feel like I'm riding a rocket into space.

Do I do that in towns? Very rarely. I mostly try obeying speed limit with calm hand on the throttle and reasonable engine speed and shooting off when leaving a town. I'm super noise-conscious when riding after dark. I also don't rev on red lights just for the hell of it. I live on both sides of this problem, as a city dweller i hate being woken by noise, but it's more often some doofus in a knocking diesel car letting the engine idle for 20 minutes as he picks up his friends at 11 pm. I guess cars like that wouldn't be punishable, because they are not tuned to make noise. And when I hear the whine of a motorbike from the hills on the outskirts, it just makes me smile and plan a next ride.

To sum up: yes, loud pipes can be obnoxious, but it depends on the driver. If they get banned, people like me will lose a part of their hobby and noisemakers will find another way to be obnoxious (burnouts? screechy braking? loud music?)

"Why loud pipes then? Because it's so much fun to open the throttle wide and hear and feel the roar vibrating through the bike and myself! Makes me feel like I'm riding a rocket into space. "

Well you could use a vibrator then.

Quieter and more close to the body...

> "Loud pipes save lives" is nonsense. When a driver is concentrated on visual stimuli, has his windows up and music playing, there are no pipes loud enough to make him notice me.

As a former motoryclist with very loud pipes (and also an open air filter, which is just as bad or worse), I can tell you it‘s not just that. Exhaust noise emitted by a motorcycle is way louder behind the it than in front of it, especially when you and the bike are moving in the same direction. I have no hard numbers to back up this claim, but I once switched bikes with a buddy and while my bike was almost inaudible when I was driving in front of him, I was shocked how loud it was driving 200 m / 1/8 mile behind him.

As someone who lived next to a busy road for about 10 years, I’ve always wondered why people do this, so thanks for the perspective. The apartment was about 10 feet away, with no isolation, and a 65mph speed limit, so, surprisingly, it was worse when there were fewer cars because people would throttle harder. So because of this past living situation, I’ve grown to hate the noise of loud vehicles at any time of the day, and if I were given the opportunity to limit the amount of loud vehicles on the road, I’d always take it. Eventually I bought sound panels and put them in my road-facing windows, and then also in my rooms closest to the road, but eventually I decided it would be best to just move.

Is it the noise that makes it exhilarating though? If you had to use an electric motorcycle would your enjoyment be decreased that much? I'm sure you're right that it's a small amount of people riding obnoxiously, but those people make walking around a city stressful and unenjoyable for a far greater number of people.

What I'm saying is that although this will be a bit crap for you, to the average person that's probably worth the trade off.

I am dead against noisy bikes, but from having an old 1 litre 60bhp Peugeot 106 hatchback car many years ago, the noise of the full-open throttle with your accelerator pedal mashed into the floor with revs rising to a crescendo at the red line etc is certainly quite exhilarating, even if you were not actually going all that fast with 60bhp. (I am getting hairs down my back just typing this).

I would imagine you'd get a similar sensation from the whir/whine of an electric car picking up in pitch etc as you approach "the red line", but I don't know how well that is hushed away in modern EVs

This is the right question I think.

For me personally, not the person you replied to, it is the noise.

After years of soul-searching, and as a music lover, it’s about the noise. I will (or would) leave NYS over this. 76dB 50ft away under 35mph and over 35mph it’s 82dB - a joke. Once I found the perfect engine note, the rest is history. Speed is fun, but sound and steering are more character.

Currently the goal of purchasing this soul-rending, sonorous beast is sustaining me in life.

I’ll do my very best to be judicious with valves closing the exhaust around town and at night.

Making a financially foolish move and touring the country isn’t the worst mistake you could make in an awful mood.

> If they get banned, people like me will lose a part of their hobby and noisemakers will find another way to be obnoxious (burnouts? screechy braking? loud music?)

Like most things in New York, it comes down to what NYPD officers actually care about enforcing. Per the article:

> But the law doesn’t doesn’t compel law enforcement to issue tickets, nor does it require police cars to be equipped with decibel readers.

tldr: these laws won't do shit then. Officers won't enforce what they aren't required to, this just gets added to the list of offenses they can use to harass someone or tack onto a speeding ticket.

> In 2021, New Yorkers filed the most complaints about engine idling since 2018: 13,489 complaints. The police issued 75 summons in response to complaints, data shows. > Specifically, police issued 14 summonses for excessive vehicle noise — the most between 2018 and the present, a period in which the police issued a total of 26 excessive vehicle noise summonses.

There is one dude who drives past my window on 6th Ave, every single morning, at 7 AM, with an engine so loud it rattles glass ten stories up. That should be 365.24 summons/year, _for that guy_.

Until the cops choose to enforce the laws, nothing will fucking change. I'm thrilled the government is claiming to care here, but until anyone chooses to have these people hanged from the yardarm^W^W^W^W nothing will fucking change.

By the way, did you know it is _illegal_ to honk your horn in NYC outside of an emergency? Neither do the the people honking constantly outside my window! Why doesn't the NYPD just fine all of these people every single day until it stops? They could fund the entire department! But they simply don't care.

Many of my friends dream happily of enforcing vigilante justice for the loud motorists. I personally would be thrilled if this guy:

>But Pennachio conceded he has modified four of the 11 cars he owns to enhance the rumbling of the engine, as a matter of pleasure, not safety. “Just to know you’re in a beefier man’s car,” he said.

was evicted from the city. He is a horrible person with no redeeming characteristics and doesn't deserve to live in society.

I don't know how your windows are made, but you can't really use glass to gauge the sound level of noise. If it is in anyway loose, it acts like a very rigid speaker diaphragm. It moves back and forth with any sound, since glass basically doesn't flex. What you're actually measuring is your own ability to perceive its movement.

As far as fining motorists for horn usage, if it works like everywhere else in the US there is no way they could ever actually make good on the fines. As long even a small percentage of people requested a court hearing (doesn't matter if it is a jury trial or something else) the police officer would basically spend 1 day writing fines, the remaining days in the year just sitting in court.

I'm unsure though, maybe NYC has a provision allowing it to issue fines you can't contest.

> As far as fining motorists for horn usage, if it works like everywhere else in the US there is no way they could ever actually make good on the fines.

Confiscate their cars, problem solved.

> I'm unsure though, maybe NYC has a provision allowing it to issue fines you can't contest.

Fairly certain such a scheme would be illegal.

> By the way, did you know it is _illegal_ to honk your horn in NYC outside of an emergency?

I had a next door neighbor, someone picked their kid up from school every morning about 7:00am. Every morning, the car would pull in to the driveway between our houses and lay on the horn until the kid came out.

I don't believe it's widely appreciated how some motorcycles impact young children, whose ears are more sensitive. There's a Harley owner near me who would leave for work at about the same time as I would be walking my kids to school. His bike made them cry, and they learned to pass it with their hands over their ears.

These cars (and motorcycles) are terrible, but to be honest they're like... rare/anecdotal level terrible. They buzz loudly by once a few weeks in nice weather. Its bad, but its no...

CAR ALARMS

OMG I HATE CAR ALARMS SO MUCH

its astonishing to me that our social contract says "its ok to blast an air horn endlessly in residential neighborhoods"

If you live in a town with great outdoor dining near a main downtown-strip you will quickly notice that the same dingalings rev their modded cars trucks up and down the strip over-and-over-and-over-and-over again. Especially on Friday and Saturday evenings. It’s beyond obnoxious. Why grown men think this makes them look like anything other than petulant children I truly cannot fathom.

> they're like... rare/anecdotal level terrible. They buzz loudly by once a few weeks

For you. I live in Dallas, and it happens every single day, every few hours.

How about we tax everyone based on the acoustical emissions their machinery creates?

Then you're just legally codifying that it's fine to create noise pollution if you're rich. Taxes do not solve negative externalities. The shitheads who intentionally modify their vehicles to be louder would most likely be perfectly willing to pay extra for everyone around them to know how much they spent to be loud.

I've spent a stupid amount of brain time on this. Pi-zero's with a couple microphones, cameras, 18650s and a solar cell in a super rugged sealed ABS belt-case. Strapped to telephone poles, capturing make/model/license-plate of anything that exceeds X decibels for Y minutes. Posting a top 10 offenders automatically to the city website. Autogenerating sound-map-reports to show what the 95th% locations and causes are to target effective enforcement of EXISTING laws.

Sure I see the dystopic surveillance society part, but technically we already have that. Wouldn't it be nice to have quality of life benefits from it instead of just military and marketing uses.

I want QoL SLOs.

Or, to combine two horrible things: car alarms that get set off by loud exhaust!

In a modern well built nyc apartment you hear basically no street noise.

In older construction street noise can be so bad I’ve bent over backwards and rearranged my apartment to make my bedroom quiet.

That said, this is tilting at windmills.

The majority of awful street noise is people being loud. It is people arguing, people being drunk, and frustrated drivers leaning in their horns.

This sucks, and I wish they wouldn’t do it. I have gone outside my house and explained to frustrated drivers what impact they are having on everyone who lives where they are honking. Countless times.

It’s a city. Cities are loud. NYC is LOUD LOUD.

We can the worst of this with better construction. NYC makes it hard and expensive to do construction. Almost, it would seem, deliberately. Including renovations.

So they are scapegoating one egregious and visible minority group of offenders while completely punting on the bulk of the problem.

Of course.

*mitigate the worst of this

Being a very light sleeper myself I have often wake-dreamed about this sort of thing. But also being a techie I have never really come up with a solution that I'd call satisfactory in terms of privacy, surveillance, and potential for abuse by law enforcement. The only exception being a system very much like described in the article: volume meter, coupled to camera. Doesn't record actual audio, serves as entry point for further investigation. But that still puts in place a surveillance infrastructure & associated processes.

Which is why, once I've gone back to sleep, and woken up more or less refreshed, I typically go "huh, that needs more thought put in it."

"A sound meter records vehicles passing by. If it captures a sound at least 50 feet away that is above 85 decibels — for reference, that’s around the sound of a blender or a lawn mower — a camera records images of the vehicle’s license plate."

Surveillance is a good thing when it's used to punish people who annoy me. Hopefully once the system is in place they'll be able to improve the technology to detect anybody who endangers the public by speaking a banned word or phrase.

Conversation and ideas have value. What's the value of noise that 99% of the population finds not just annoying but actively distressing? If you want to tell me you're an asshole, just carry a sign or yell it out for everyone to hear. You don't need a motorcycle to do it any more than you need to assault someone to convey how much you dislike them.

>"Neither the pilot nor the SLEEP Act are intended to be a check on cars that blast music."

Incessant horn honking and blaring car stereos, both of which are significant noise contributors won't be included? Does that make any sense? If the goal is to bring the noise pollution under control via the use of sound cameras why would you limit it to mufflers? The sound camera device's metric is decibels. Why should the program discriminate the source of noise pollution?

Not sure but maybe it is a "sound signature" thing. IE it might be possible to automate matching a car based on exhaust noise. But not for a song on the stereo.

I don't think so. The device I believe they are using is the same one as in France - the "medusa" technology by Bruitparif. This document shows the device picking up cafe noise vs construction vs street cleaning. There's some details here:

https://www.euronoise2018.eu/docs/papers/124_Euronoise2018.p...

I live in Brooklyn and noticed this kind of thing before the pandemic - I'd say 2018 or so. I suspect (but I can't confirm) that there was recently a glut of aftermarket mufflers and exhaust systems that were able to amp up a cheap car to make it sounds cool on the BQE. As a technologist it's been interesting to see the growth of this stuff as more and more people figured out what to order on Wish to make their Nissan sound like a tractor.

Nothing puts me in a more authoritatrian frame of mind than getting my eardrums blasted by someone who's modified their 125cc scooter with a loud after-market exhaust.

these noise making mufflers are everywhere...you can hear them for miles

You are most likely hearing vehicles with stolen catalytic converters. When the economy gets bad, it becomes more common that people steal catalytic converters and sell them on the used car part black market.

A catalytic converter and a muffler are different things. And this article and conversation is mostly about cars and motorbikes that make noise by use of tuned exhaust, often with no muffler and / or made to be a resonator to increase the noise.

In Hungary they jack cars up in broad daylight and steal catalytic converters.

Here's one thing people who don't live in NYC may not understand: many streets have built up buildings on both sides. In an open area with normal low-density houses a lot of sound would dissipate into the open air. In NYC it reflects and makes the effective volume much louder.

Sirens seem to be calibrated for open air environments and they end up being perceived way louder than they actually need to be. I really wish the city would fix this because it's a solvable problem. Just dynamically adjust the volume based on how much sound is reflected.

Anyway, this makes these open engine straight piping vehicles just that much worse in the city than they might be in suburban Ohio. I also understand the argument that being loud for a motorcyclist is a safety issue. At least I am sympathetic to that at 50+ mph. But in the city if you're not driving on an expressway, a parkway, a freeway or an otherwise major road (eg the Van Wyck) then you're simply not going above 30mph, probably not even 20mph.

I've had cases where one of these idiots passing actually causes things to shake in your apartment. That's not a safety issue. It's a "deliberately being an inconsiderate asshole" issue.

That all being said, the NYPD seems to have SWAT teams at the ready for black teens who have a joint or jump a subway turnstile but, at least in my experience, they do almost nothing when it comes to traffic enforcement. In over 10 years of living in NYC I think I saw the cops pull over 3 people. Blocking intersections is rampant. Running red lights is rampant. And this is without even getting into parking violations (eg blocking pedestrian crossings, parking in bike lanes, blocking fire hydrants).

So will this noise law even be enforced? I'll need to see it before I believe it.

Fellow New Yorker. It will not be. NYPD is a joke

I used to live on a steep hillside of San Francisco and the car noise was so bad. Car engines were so loud when they go uphill.

After that, I became so cautious of the noise issue that whenever I’m looking for a place to live, I look out for steep hill, train tracks, police station, hospitals, main street (the ones with double yellow lines), highway, airport, air plane ascending and descending routes.

Excellent advice. I'll add one more, having made the same mistake twice, twenty years apart:

Don't live in an apartment at the corner of a four-way stop. The noise of squeaking brakes + engines accelerating from a stop is far worse than engines maintaining speed.

> while some car and motorcycle enthusiasts think the efforts are misguided

These people are not from the city. New York is unique perhaps in the world in that a huge number of people are living nearby with a completely suburban/typical car-centric American lifestyles, but regularly visit the city. It is a completely alien world to them that they do not understand and treat it like a playground. There is a staggering amount of anti-social behavior being committed constantly by folks in cars with New Jersey license plates, particularly on weekends. Their expectations of what they should be able to do with their cars, how much parking they should have, how much noise they should be able to make, and how quickly they should be able to move through dense pedestrian zones are completely unrealistic. They really should ban non-resident street parking like many nearby municipalities do.

> But the law doesn’t doesn’t compel law enforcement to issue tickets, nor does it require police cars to be equipped with decibel readers.

Couldn't this be enhanced to operate like camera speed traps, just take a picture of the car passing by? The same tech used to determine gunshot location could pick the specific car if there are multiple.

France is rolling this out currently. We'll see if it does any good.

I couldn't find any links in English, but here are some pictures of the tech:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=france+m%C3%A9duses+radars+anti-br...

As someone who has to endure modified cars doing laps around a nearby supermarket parking lot starting every evening at 10pm now, I wish this was a thing everywhere.

I can live with tire/wind noise - it's wide spectrum, so not that unpleasant. Also noise-canceling headphones reduce it greatly.

But anything that has discernible harmonics wakes me up immediately.

I live in a building with a large courtyard (inspired by the architecture of Barcelona I guess, only it's a single unit, so not terribly well thought through) which amplifies every sound that gets in and bounces around the walls.

There's a railway a kilometer away which I hear much better than people living closer to it because of this, but that normally doesn't disturb my sleep.

What did to my surprise a few days ago was a phone conversation some drunk had - it wasn't even loud, just noticable - I suppose because it was human speech.

There's this trend of souped up 4 wheelers eg not real cars hammering 2nd and 1st Avenue without mufflers ... Basically a group of hooligans that goes up and down doing tricks and taking over the road. This is likely the primary instigator... everyone is sick and tired of that group

"Specifically, police issued 14 summonses for excessive vehicle noise — the most between 2018 and the present, a period in which the police issued a total of 26 excessive vehicle noise summonses."

Glad to see this law but NYPD doesn't care about anything. They'll issue far more tickets for cyclists not having lights than something like this. You can drive through NYC in a way so reckless that it should be considered assault (with no license plate) and nobody will do anything about it. I regularly look up reckless drivers on howsmydrivingny.nyc while walking around, often to find tens of school zone speed violations. NYC is non-functional, regardless of what the law says.

Seems sensible, especially if the upgrades to the cars are already illegal! From my time in the city (Edinburgh so not exactly NYC) the biggest improvement would've been better sound insulation between walls, you really could hear everything from neighbours even when I was in old tenement buildings, though they were better than the newer builds which had paper thin walls. Seems like the better plasterboard (dry wall I think its called in America) is only marginally more expensive than the rubbish that gets used but that margin isn't worth it to the flat builders/repairers!

I wish there were some labour laws that required this in office settings. The commute isn't what kills me in an office, its the coughing, chewing, and yelling across the room. Sheer distraction and discomfort.

This is very funny, very funny indeed. Every few years New York has a big press release about cracking down on the noise from cars. And then they enforce it for a week. And then they drop it.

Related discussion on how noise hurts the heart(511 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30983274

The Hacker News crowd should be developing a 'red light camera' system for excessively noisy vehicles. Inspiration already lies in the 360 degree conference room camera systems.

This is a problem throughout America, rural and urban. Certainly more frequent and loud in city areas, however easier to legislate in cities. I wish states would start rolling out some basic rules. OTOH, eventually EV will take over, and gas will become prohibitively expensive for the hold outs. I predict that will happen first.

> The Hacker News crowd should be developing a 'red light camera' system for excessively noisy vehicles. Inspiration already lies in the 360 degree conference room camera systems.

It already exists. Last year it was pilot tested in a few cities in France and this year they've apparently started rolling out the technology nationally.

I couldn't find an article in English. The tech is called a "méduse" ("jellyfish" because of the way the microphones hang down off of it) or "radar anti-bruit" if you want to try searching.

I hope this tech comes to Philadelphia soon as well. The ATV's and other off-road vehicles making heinously loud noise at all hours is frustrating and unnecessary. It benefits no one but the egos of the riders. It'd be great for them to be off the road entirely, they consistently disobey traffic laws. But I'd be happy just to turn the noise down a bit.

Even suburbs are noisy -- those damned weedwhackers and lawnmowers! You go to live in this simulation of a peaceful park, but the racket never ends -- from the lawn crews who maintain the simulation.

So then you head out to the country for some peace and quiet. And it works for a while until -- what the hell is that? -- oh, it's a trio of quad-bikes.

It's the damned engines.

The depths of the pandemic were the golden years for street racers since the lockdowns meant no traffic. I live in OakCliff which is a neighborhood just SW of downtown Dallas. There are so many semi-souped up Dodge Challenger and Chargers it’s a running joke. Very loud, very annoying, plus they kill some poor innocent bystander about 4-5 times a year.

I was impressed that back in the Bloomberg era, NYC allowed citizens to report and equipped police/civil agencies to act on noise complaints. Living in a city with noise is already tough. Plus, there was a story lately about citizen monitoring of idling truck emissions with a bounty on them. Seems NYC is more assertive about this stuff.

I have only spent a long weekend in New York so I'm no expert but from my experience the utility vehicles (garbage trucks, buses, fire engines etc) were far louder than in Europe, to the point that it would wake you up despite being in a hotel room 20 floors up. Didn't notice any issue with modified vehicles.

I'm surprised that this is not already a thing. I believe (while anectodal at this point, I'd bet science would find something if this eas tested) noise pollution and light pollution have many adverse effects on humans and animals. Good to see there are laws emerging around this.

I heard that Taipei will also install something like this but I'm not sure when. Taipei is an extremely noisy city with traffic cop whistles, loud scooters, and harbagttrucks that blare a time to tell you when to bring out your trash.

This is great. I hope other states adopt it as well.

Personal planes that cause noise should be addressed as well. Why do thousands of residents need to be exposed to plane sound (personal, propelled ones) so that one person have fun time?

In NYC, noise laws and listening tech gets deployed to curtail noise.

In China (e.g. Shanghai), they simply banned combustion motorcycles from the city. Visited years ago and it was pretty interesting to experience.

Good. I live in a (relatively speaking) smaller City in the UK and general city noise is what you expect. But unneccessary ICE noise makes me so angry. Find other way to show people how manly you are.

Good. Removing loud bass systems from cars (even ones that come from the factory) ought to be next. People are entirely careless when it comes to the impact they make on others.

Having spent a lot of time in the Bronx -- these selfish people are an absolute nuisance that do a lot to damage the quality of life for everyone else in the neighborhood.

Amsterdam, insanely narrow streets and scooters riding up and down them all night. Worst city for sleep I’ve ever been in.

It's ridiculous ICE scooters are still allowed. They make more noise and cause more pollution than a 50 ton truck.

It's ridiculous considering how rules focused we are in Holland!

Is this just not an excuse to not only put video surveillance on the street but also listening devices on the street?

It's just bizarre that we allow cars and motorcycles to produce so much more noise than needed.

This in Sydney please!! We vote in a few hours time... anybody supporting this get my vote

Great, please detect and automatically fine unnecessary horn use too

Need one for SF to get the loud ass motorcycles out of our streets.

Good! London next, please.

I am split on this one. I grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn during the late 60s - 80s, and the sound of salsa, bongos, song, cars, and motorcycles in the summer sometimes upset my father especially when it went into the late hours. I loved it, and enjoyed it. It brings goosepimples to me when I hear a similar environment. I used to escape the bad part of the neighborhood, gang and drug violence, on my rooftop with my cheap telescope and light pollution was more of an annoyance to me. I think there are extremes with modified exhausts and cars for just the sake of noise. On the other hand, I ride a motorcycle with stock exhaust, and I sometimes rev it to alert nearby drivers of my presence. I was a motorcycle messenger in the 80s and rode bikes in NYC for years, so I am very savvy about NYC traffic and pitfalls and noise. I still get thrilled when I hear a certain exhaust sound. You can get good windows that block a lot of noise if you want quiet in the city. Turn on the AC, close your windows. Move to the country if you want to keep your windows open all day and listen to birdsong and the wind through the trees (I love that). I compare all this talk about noise and regulations to the time I went to Klagenfurt, Austria in the early 90s, and it was beautiful, but there were fences and signs all over that read, 'Verboten' for keeping off park grass, noise, congregrating, etc. We cut our stay to two days and instead headed early to Italy, because Klagenfurt didn't seem to have any soul. That's my personal bias, and I am sure if you live there, you can find its soul (you don't need a Eurorail pass and border checks anymore). I don't want to ban everything, or limit it to the most sensitive among us. That may lead to adapting to that, and further putting constraints on what's harmful, permissible, and enjoyable to some but not others. I subjectively feel the rise in allergies in our younger children is due to shielding them from foods and experiences and over cleaning our dwellings. We adapt as humans. I may be wrong, but I never met as many people with allergies when I was younger as I do now. In my peer group, where I raised my children all over (rice fields of Indonesia, mountain cabin in NJ on a lake), and outdoors eating everything starting from a young age, they don't have the plethora of allergies as my peers' children do. No nut, gluten, seafood, or other common allergies. My peers who clean incessantly, didn't feed nuts or other various foods to their kids until they were 3 or 5, and similar practices, have children that have multiple allergies. When I invite kids to my children's birthday parties, I need to list all of the 'don'ts' for the party, or buy double. Something is wrong for sure; it's not just anecdotal. Look at this story for both sides of it, and try and see each side's perspective. I try to not jump to trying to stop, regulate, or insulate myself from things before giving them a real chance [1].

[1] https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/austin-car-clubs-...

FYI: Living room music/TV is around 76 dB, and the law will have 'robocops' issuing summons like speed cameras do from 76 to 90 decibels per the posted article.

This is not good. The problem here is essentially social, or we might call it antisocial -- people simply not caring about the living beings around them. That can't actually be solved with technology, but you can definitely create technology to detect loud sounds and ticket people. This simultaneously enriches the state and helps tighten the noose of surveillance and control, while doing nothing about the root issue.

* Despite how it appears, this comment was not actually modded down -- it has been pre-censored by HN, allegedly to help preserve curiosity.

This makes my blood boil. Fuck this guy. Fuck this guy. I hope he gets all his vehicles impounded.

What’s funny is that I’ve heard true beefy cars. Audi R8s are basically silent when they want to be; and the Lamborghini I recall that I admittedly could hear from 6 floors up in an office building was being as quiet as they could be, low rpms and gentle acceleration and all, they just had *that bass*.

Real, big engines super cars don’t actually tend to be noisy in city settings.

Unsurprising to me. Good engineering includes efficiency, i.e. little energy wasted to acoustical output.

I once had my catalytic converter rust open. I pulled off into a parking lot to turn around, and I was embarrassed at how loud my car was, just barely accelerating through the parking lot, I couldn't believe how loud it was.

Does Pennachio not realize that every rust bucket 4-cylinder economy car is capable of being extremely loud?

It’s infuriating when people choose to annoy thousands of others for their lulz. I agree, blood boiling.

Do yourself a favor and do not look up “rolling coal” online.

I find this sentiment rather unsettling. Who am I to deny someone else their fun in life? There is a Dutch retort to this kind of condescending remark: "who are you, the pope"?

Last night, I had a discussion with a friend about how neighbours' noise complaints are ruining small-time, local run and operated cafes in the country (in Germany also). Noise complainants are becoming all-powerful to the point of unreasonableness.

Can we accept that in society, asses exist that are going to behave like asses no matter what, and not micromanage/regulate literally every aspect of life. I dread this kind of society where we have a law dictating how long you have to cut your grass in your front garden.

People doing what they want is fine as long as it doesn’t negatively impact anyone else. What really gets me here is that this guy is going out of his way to be obnoxious.

Now we have an electric car, and it handles fast acceleration so easily. By comparison, gas cars seem to painfully lurch forward. Modifying a gas car to make it louder just draws more attention to the struggle. Like its driver... it's trying too hard.

He does have a bit of a toxic masculinity thing going on there.

Personally - I enjoy some loud cars and motorcycles but not the typical Harley types that roll by at 20mph wide open or the clapped out Chevy Tahoe with a rusted out muffler going from stop sign to traffic light. I’m more of a Ferrari 458, Fireblade, LFA, R8 V10, etc. type. High revving exotics and motorcycles - and tend to prefer their sounds as they are going somewhere not revving. I can appreciate some others - even my own non-exotic but special car sounds great to me. It’s one of the reasons I bought it - it sounded amazing from the factory.

But people who modify the cars to seem more macho? Yikes. I listen to the sound for my own pleasure - no one else. Literally could not give a shit how it sounds to others. I know when I go for drives with others that sometimes they enjoy the sound too. It’s thrilling and definitely adds to the experience. Top down - engine screaming like a banshee - especially in a tunnel. It gives a real “race car” type of sensation hearing it come alive like that.

It’s definitely something I’ve never experienced driving EVs and I’ve driven them faster than 99% of people ever will. Just tire squeal is all you get. Maybe a slight hum or what not. (Brake squeal I guess but again not my favorite sound…) Definitely not an auditory experience for an enthusiast.

But how else is that guy going to demonstrate his elevated testosterone levels when he is driving a car?

Or, wait... maybe his levels are low? Something seems a little off in either case.

> “Amplified volume is imperative to keep us safe” when riding motorcycles.

The unmitigated, narcissistic gall of solving a problem of one's own making (choosing to ride a motorcycle), by annoying everyone else.

When I am Necromancer-King, anyone even thinking of making this argument will lose all "making sound" privileges of any kind at all - not only motorcycle, but even talking, playing music, tv - for a long, long time.

I fantasize about cheap, robotic air guns designed to inflict painful welts on these noisy assholes.

The best part is these guys will look you dead in the eye and tell you about "safety" while riding a motorcycle in a t-shirt and the absolute legal minimum head protection.

I suspect the argument is bullshit, but they cannot say "I get a boner when I think about all the people I piss off and there's not a thing they can do about it"

I agree with your general sentiment but as a motorcyclist myself, what can I do to ensure that the cars surrounding me (windows up, listening to music, carrying out conversation, probably fiddling with a phone) are aware of my existence without making noise? The greatest threat to responsible motorcyclists are unaware drivers. An electric motorcycle might as well be invisible amongst ordinary traffic.

If you're saying "It is too dangerous to ride motorcycles without making lots of noise" then you're saying "It's too dangerous to ride motorcycles". Full stop. Any other answer is turning a "you" problem into an "everyone" problem.

Further, this “problem of our own making” is us taking on greater personal risk at a net overall reduction of risk for road users as a whole.

It reminds me of the situation with cyclists where people like to complain about their “dangerous” behavior. But almost nothing a cyclist does on the road will undo the net reduction in risk to road users as a whole simply by choosing to ride a bicycle instead of operating a car.

I’m not saying that motorcycles should be unmuffled. I run a stock exhaust and do my best to idle through residential areas, and I too hate any vehicles that rattle windows and set car alarms off when they pass by. I guess my point is that if I were necromancies-king, I’d try to find a way to get all users of the road to experience empathy for others on the road and particularly for more vulnerable ones whose mere existence makes roads safer for everyone.

If you read the Hurt Report, most motorcycle-involved collisions happen from the front of the bike, with the car making an unprotected left across the bike's lane. Increasing visual conspicuity of the front of your bike (and attire) is the best way to avoid being hit. Exhaust noise is not a safety feature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_findings_in_the_Hurt_R...

Is this only an issue when lane splitting? If I can see other cars doing normal things I can see motorcycles. Can't you just not lane split and don't sit in people's blind spots. Which drivers should already do

Before covid I would commute daily in London to work filtering (lane splitting) through traffic. You operate on the assumption that they don't see / hear you and you need to anticipate their movements, and be much more switched on. I can almost guarantee no one has ever heard my bike from a car until I've passed by it but it's irrelevant I find as cars try to kill me even when they do see me. Biking is just more dangerous and there comes a point where you are only as safe as you are lucky.

> what can I do to ensure that the cars surrounding me (windows up, listening to music, carrying out conversation, probably fiddling with a phone) are aware of my existence without making noise?

Your implicit assumption is that if you make enough noise, you will pop their "windows up, listening to music, fiddling with a phone" filter bubble.

And that noise is the most efficient way to do this.

I wonder how much noise that would take, esp in more modern cars with good soundproofing?

Or perhaps other methods might be more effective?

I can’t believe it needs to be said but the answer is sight. The sense of sight is how vehicle drivers are able to navigate and avoid collisions with other vehicles.

There are perfectly unobtrusive sounds electric motorcycles can (and do) make such as beeping.

amen

Riding a motorcycle is absolutely not "a problem of ones own making". My commute for about 5 years was between 2-3 times quicker on a motorcycle than it would have been in a car on average and it reduced congestion for other road users. You could apply your logic for basically any form of transport - "We shouldn't have bus lanes, they're just solving a problem of bus riders' own making by annoying everyone else".

There's no reason for stupidly loud exhausts (although ICE motorbikes will likely always be louder than cars due to the exposed engine and not enough room for a larger muffler), but that has nothing to do with your apparent irrational hatred of motorcycles.

> irrational hatred of motorcycle

I very clearly linked my "irrational hatred" to the noise. Interesting that you read that and thought "that's me!"

Is it irrational to hate people who intentionally inflict loud, unpleasant noise indiscriminately on everyone else - sleepers, infants, daydreamers, musics listeners, meditators - because of their own lifestyle choice? Surprisingly, someone who does this thinks so.

I actually admire quiet motorcyclists. They are adults who understand the risks and accept them. Like adults do.

There are plenty of motorcycles that do not make a ridiculous amount of noise, the ones that do clearly do so because of a conscious choice by their 'hey look at me' owners.

ITT: city folks complaining about city stuff.

If you want it quiet move out of the city. The noise problem won’t go away in our lifetimes. So why getting angry at the sea? Just get out and enjoy the comfy country life.

I think most city dwellers aren't unhappy with the general background noise in a city. It's something we're all accustomed to and indeed something many of us struggle without. There are of course going to be things people will justifiably gripe about when given a chance, but that doesn't mean they should move to the countryside, that's a slightly absurd suggestion.

Except city life can be comfy and quiet. It’s not like there aren’t cities that have successfully tackled this problem. See Delft: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8

While road noise is very annoying and serious, I will be displeased if this only targets certain types of noise and not others.

Additionally, at a time when the streets are seriously unsafe, this should not be a priority.

It is reasons like this that I am infinitely glad I left NYC for the woods of the West Coast.

EDIT: I would just like to add, if you feel that the streets of NYC are a safe place at night for women, children, or whomever, then I really feel like your opinion is very dismissive of people who have been seriously injured or killed.

> EDIT: I would just like to add, if you feel that the streets of NYC are a safe place at night for women, children, or whomever, then I really feel like your opinion is very dismissive of people who have been seriously injured or killed.

The vast majority of homicide victims are male. In the US, the number is 78%. In the whole world, it is 79% [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homicide_statistics_by_gender

>women, children, or whomever

and who are the vast majority of assault and rape victims?

As is true for all traffic laws, they are going to “target” minorities as yet another excuse to over police.

https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data

I’m pretty sure it is just going to go by decibel level, it is a lot of added complexity to make the devices not just listen for noise but to also identify skin color.

They are going to target offenders. Minorities happen to have higher rates of offense. These are not the same things.

I understand a lot of people here are saying "but it's only about noise level", but I think they are all forgetting that it's a judgement call from police and involves selective enforcement. Laws will be ignored for people who "look honest" and enforced for those who look "likely to cause trouble".

Being a minority doesn't give you the right to be an asshole

"News reports say what should have been a simple traffic stop for violating a new noise restriction turned into tragedy. The driver turned violent, and when officers tazed him, he suffered a heart attack. The city claims drugs were in his system, but civil rights groups say this was another instance of prejudice and over policing. Demonstrations are building tonight, and the city has ordered riot police to be on the ready..."

Did we learn nothing from Eric Garner? You create thousands of petty rules, you will eventually kill someone with them.

While I certainly don't encourage over-policing or the proliferation of "rules" - I subscribe to Churchill's view on regulations [0] - I'm not sure I can entirely fault the police in the above quoted passage - "The driver turned violent."

I tick every single privilege box, some of them a few times over, and would think myself quite lucky if I was only tazed for turning violent with the police. While it's unfortunate that the driver's poor health led to an unintentional heart attack, I don't believe it does the rule of law much good to allow drivers, or anyone, to be violent with the police with impunity.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/quotes/10331/

Everybody against "something". Today is the noise, tomorrow are the kids playing around and then if somebody whistles it will be mandated to shut up because there will be always somebody annoyed...

Karen's society...

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