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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/...

6. Mopeds

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

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.

I think for new mopeds they should be required to be electric starting 2026.

Mopeds don't need big batteries and the batteries can be taken out and charged at home.

It's really the perfect vehicle to electrify. Yes, it will make them slightly more expensive at start but it will remove a huge burden of noise and smell from the communities.

Modern E-bikes can definitely compete with mopeds, and I think will ultimately replace them, once cost starts to go down. The majority of the mopeds on the roads in most places and 20+ years old and likely in use because they are so easy to keep running. I think it was the first thing I learned how to fix as a kid.

I haven’t seen a moped in NYC in, I think, years. Delivery guys all drive electric bikes, electric scooters or ICE scooters. None of them are a noise issue.

I live on a main road but have good double glazing.

However, there are a few things I can still hear:

* Sirens - though these are relatively infrequent and necessary so I don't mind them.

* People playing music extremely loudly. I can feel the bass vibrations even though I'm more than 10 metres from the road.

* Lorries with unbalanced loads.

* Motorbikes/mopeds with modified exhausts.

> 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).

Chiming in to totally agree. At the start of the year I had no local friends and was just starting to meet people. I matched with someone online who was part of a local queer skater group, and we met and got along. Then suddenly I had a huge group of people where there’s always someone skating Saturday and Sunday every weekend. This made it super easy for me to drop in to a social group any time I wanted, and for months that’s where I was every weekend. The queer skater group is one contingent of a larger group of skaters, so in all there’s usually a good 30 people hanging out and skating together every weekend. It’s a huge new social group for me and they throw events with donations from local skate shops, they do board swaps and clothing swaps, have Instagram groups and photographers. I laughed when I read “anti-social”. The skateboarding group I connected with is the biggest social group I have!

I think that is misreading the original comment.

Skateboarding is antisocial because skateboarders are inflicting a noisy hobby on the neighbors. It has nothing to do with whether the skateboarder will make friends or not.

Usually the neighbors inflicted things like park closures, "no loitering" near commercial parking lots, and vetoing neighborhood skate parks on the skaters, all of which would be further from resident bedrooms, and much safer for pedestrians, skaters and sleepers.

Instead folks seem to hope that by demonizing and inconveniencing a relatively harmless teenage activity that simply requires a bit of outdoor space as "antisocial", skateboarding will just...go away?

I'd argue that usually the neighbors are people entirely removed from the skate boarding debate one way or the other. They just don't want excessive noise pollution outside their apartment (be it from skateboarders, mopeds, neighbors with bass-heavy stereos, etc.)

I mean the group I go to meets at a disused commuter overflow parking lot under a noisy raised train station so they’re quieter than their surroundings and not really bothering anyone. Still it’s wild to call a group anti social when they are in fact a very social gathering.

I think (and this is just my intuition over the years) in the UK 'anti social' is used very broadly to mean 'detracting from the public interest', where here in America I've most often heard it to mean someone who shuns the company of others.

I meant anti-social to non-skateboarders, as in anti-social behaviour.

"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/...

We have skate parks, but skateboarders would come and do tricks on our hill while filming themselves, plus there were a few people who used them for commuting at the dead of night.

Cities can be surprisingly silent at the dead of night, someone riding along on a skateboard makes a huge amount of noise and as they're going slowly, for quite a long time.

Why would someone commute on a skateboard instead of a longboard? They are both similarly annoying to carry on foot and stow away later.

Maybe they have skateboard and dont have cruiser/longboard. Or they were doing tricks and are coming back on the thing they had with them.

"Environmental antisocial behaviour is when a person’s actions affect the wider environment, such as public spaces or buildings."

With that definition, we could classify just about anything as antisocial.

No? How is reading a book in your home antisocial?

That book is printed on trees, or the device is powered. Those inflict externalities on others (trees for paper, components for the device, power inputs). Thus it affects others and the wider environment.

What's actually the antisocial behavior here is unsustainably harvesting trees, or polluting power generation. Not the act of reading itself, which has no adverse impact on other members of society.

There definitely is a difference between behavior that has a direct adverse impact on society, and pedantic attempts at portraying non-disruptive behavior as antisocial. A skateboard rolling down the street at night and waking people up is causing direct adverse impact, someone reading in their home does not.

That's not the definition given though. That's why I'm saying if That's the definition we're using, then it could be applied to just about anything.

Pushing the blame for externalities onto some nebulous other is antisocial though. It's a way of absolving yourself and others of the responsibility of agency and creating change. Limiting the definition to actions which directly "disrupt" others is simply a way for the privileged to export their antisocial behavior to ethically unburdened faceless corporations.

Is it practical to stop reading because a tree gets cut or your ereader needs charging? Probably not, but that's why change doesn't happen until it's forced by the circumstances.

Most paper is recycled (over 2/3rd). So no, it's not antisocial.

Regardless, it's still a false equivalency to try and equate directly antisocial behavior like making loud noises that disrupt people's healthy sleep and the sustainability of producing paper, some of which is used for printing novels that people read in their homes.

There's no claim of total equivalency. Only that they meet the poorly formed definition given previously

If a lone skateboard at night in a major urban area bothers you, I'd suggest considering a move.

I live on a street in NYC where the sound of a skateboard is nothing compared to sirens (cops will punch them to run the red at the corner but sometimes it’s ambulances or fire trucks) and the ridiculous mufflers mentioned in the article. I can’t even imagine being bothered by the sound of a skateboard.

Without wishing to get into the argument about skaters- antisocial has a secondary meaning which is not the opposite of 'social'. An antisocial behaviour in this sense is one that offends against the rest of society, even if it is conducted by a social group rather than a solitary individual.

English is a muddle.

Let me agree with you while going a bit further: antisocial only means one thing, and it's what you just described.

People use 'antisocial' colloquially as a synonym of 'asocial', but this is wrong, and asocial is the actual antonym.

Antisocial is no more an antonym of social than antisemitism is an antonym of Judaism.

The primary definition in the Oxford English dictionary is "opposed to sociality, averse to society or companionship." It cites a usage dating to 1797. The secondary definition given, which you claim is the only correct one, similarly cites a usage dating to 1802. If the usage you complained about was ever a mistake, 200 years of usage means it is no longer.

Language is a moving target, and like it or not, the term 'antisocial' has developed a decided bias in terms of its meaning, which carries legal and medical weight.

You don't want to go describing other people as antisocial when asocial is what you mean, this thread illustrates that.

I joke with friends about this in fact, if someone says "ah I'm probably not going I've been feeling kind of antisocial" I'll ask them if they're planning to [redacted comment on America's violent culture in poor taste].

This is magnified by British use of antisocial, see ASBO, it's not worth trying to hold the line for two meanings when asocial is just sitting there being unambiguous.

> the term 'antisocial' has developed a decided bias in terms of its meaning, which carries legal and medical weight.

Not in American English, which is why the Americans here are so confused about this whole thing. In American English, "antisocial" means "asocial" and the other meaning is obscure. And "asocial" just isn't in the lexicon as an alternative.

Um what? What do you and the other posters think anti-social means? Is this something native english speakers are confused about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour

>Anti-social behaviours are actions that harm or lack consideration for the well-being of others.

The confusion is that this is mostly a British usage. Americans don't typically use "antisocial" in this way.

In America I've seen anti-social used in the place of asocial:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/asocial

They use the estate square downstairs sometimes. Jumping over the (plastic) bench is a popular exercise - alas, they're mostly not very good at it, hence the curve in the top bar of the bench, but this also means scratter-scratter-scratter-clunk-RESOUNDING-CLUNK-screams-and-shouting, repeat every 60s for 4 hours. My brain was mush at the end of hour one, I'll be honest.

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.

It generates a huge amount of noise, this feels like absolute gaslighting. Even just going flat a skateboard is incredibly noisy, as soon as people start doing jumps or tricks it's ridiculously noisy.

And incredibly repetitive, people trying to do the same trick over and over again.

Huge? It generates noise, as most activities in a city generate noise. Yeah, grinding on rails can be noisy, kicking the board can be noisy but huge amount of noise is a tad much...

I feel that if you live in a city you either understand that it's going to be somewhat noisy or you'll go insane, skateboarding generates much less noise than any street traffic.

> I feel that if you live in a city you either understand that it's going to be somewhat noisy or you'll go insane

This is the perfect Rorschach test.

I refuse to accept this premise, that a city is noisy by default. The city is noisy because we have allowed power tools to dominate (cars, motorcycles, sirenes, ACs, ...). Today is actually somewhat of an improvement, not that long ago the city had heavy industry too: saw mills, foundries, ...

But none of that is required. The aspirational city of the future will be the one of the pre-industrial age, but with good sanitation. It is the big galvanizing project of virtually every European city now; it is pushing out cars. It's a real reduction of overall noise, and just, less tangible, but also a real reduction of that low-key trashyness and sociopathy that just seems to seep in into every urban environment where cars dominate.

America is way behind, but it _will_ happen. The future of NYC for example will undoubtedly be one without cars for personal transport.

A downstream effect is, that as the city effectively becomes more quiet because power tools get pushed out, tolerance for noisy hobbies (like skateboarding) is decreasing as well.

I live in Stockholm which is a very calm and quiet city. Still, it's noisy, simply by being a city, there is no way around that, you have thousands and thousands of people densely packed in a small area, it's bound to have noise even if it's the quietest "bigger" (1-2mil pop.) city I've ever been to.

Considering this thread has people complaining about skateboards, the clear answer is “people love cities but not all the people in them”.

I love having access to an international airport, but hate the noisy planes.

I love having local restaurants only a moments walk away but hate the late night loud chatter.

I love all the walking and transit infrastructure but hate the construction noise.

Sorry, but cities are just noisy, even absent cars, power tools. Either live with it or find somewhere else better suited.

This matches my thoughts very accurately, but I disagree with the position you take in your last sentence: yes, cities are inherently noisy. That doesn't mean we should excuse inconsiderate city dwellers who make the city even more noisy, whether because they don't know or because they don't care.

My biggest complaints: in-car subwoofers and garden parties that run till deep in the night. Both caused by people that seem to think that just because they enjoy their music, the entire neighborhood should.

Tolerance for noise decreases as the median age increases. As NYC becomes very grey (having pushed out many families and due to collapsing demographics), it will be more like Singapore where technology is deployed to punish nuisance.

>Tolerance for noise decreases as the median age increases

I think this is only true above a certain income threshold.

You need to have paid away a bunch of other more pressing problems before you have spare fucks to give about the kind of noise other people are making (except in the most egregious cases).

Good point. More and more cities are starting to punish noise with tech, some German cities want/are implementing no drive zones in city centers for certain car types. Good for noise reduction and environment.

> I feel that if you live in a city you either understand that it's going to be somewhat noisy or you'll go insane...

As a person who lives at the heart of the city, you can't believe how silent it can be.

Also a modern car cruising down the street is arguably less noisy than a hard wheeled skateboard going on concrete.

Imo, how much noise skateboard do widely depends on what kind of asphalt exactly is there. And what exactly skateboarders do. It can be fairly ok silent and also fairly noisy and stand out.

Yep. Cruising down a smooth asphalt street alone with soft wheels makes almost no noise at all.

Doing ollies and grinds on hard concrete with hard wheels and 6 of your friends who all have to yell "yeah!" every time someone lands a trick is definitely nuisance level.

Source: former nuisance.

We are talking about cars that, as someone in this thread pointed out, can be louder than jet engines. Whose noise can travel over a mile. That thunder around at night. In comparison, skating isn't that loud, and it's a daytime activity anyway. Maybe you've had some bad experiences - are people skating directly beneath your window?

Similarly, we have cars (generally C class and above) which have an engine noise akin to a silent hiss and hum, even while cruising at city speeds.

These cars are silencer than skateboards on parks or pavements.

Maybe you've had some good experiences, just seen people skating at a crowded park, and sound didn't feel piercing?

Outliers aside, a big difference between skateboards and cars is the kind of sound a skateboard makes. It's typically a lot less uniform just rolling on the pavement, with "random" sharp sounds if they're doing tricks or similar.

For me at least this is a lot more annoying or stressful than a loud but uniform sound, even if it's louder than the skateboard.

Depends on a particular city skateboard culture, I guess. They are noisy, but I where I live, I do not meet them outside some very specific locations (public squares, skateparks, etc) , which are far away from residential areas and generally extremly noisy by default.

The first time I ever saw any number of skateboarders was in Barcelona and I COULD NOT BELIEVE how loud a bunch skateboards rolling through the street was.

Even in the middle of the day it was deafening with closed windows. Every single person on the street turned to see WTF was happening. They immensely enjoyed doing it and the attention, and made sure they migrated in groups of 20+. The apartment was nearby the local art gallery where apparently they hang out and it was beyond awful.

Absolutely shocking, obnoxious behaviour and I'm so glad skateboards aren't a thing in my country.

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

The UK is now worse than Spain for this problem, and that's saying something. Sadly, it's gotten beyond the point where any politician would dare raise it as an issue.

Foxes mating is also incredibly loud.

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.

I can confirm first-hand that it's the main noise pollution source there.

As I stated in a sibling thread, 3 of the 4 sources I cited come from motorized vehicles: mopeds, general ICE noise, honking (in that order).

This is better explained by NotJustBikes video "Cities aren't loud: cars are loud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

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

Audi drivers are the scourge of humanity.

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...

Unfortunately, cameras increase the ticketing, but not reduce the problem that much. Speed bumps are both the most economical and most effective speeding solution in the city, because the "reward" for speeding is both immediate and possibly damaging.

Yes, it's a noise nuisance and comfort nuisance for the law abiding people (I drive through quite a few of them, everyday), but speeding people are much more dangerous IMHO.

Part of the problem is you usually can't drive over them at or even close to the speed limit. Especially for vans. So you either get them slowing down (squeaky brakes) and then accelerating (clattery diesel), or they smash over the bump and you hear the undertray scraping the ground.

Most trucks and vans can take most speed bumps at the speed limit (which is usually 25 or less anywhere there's speed bumps in the first place) with no ill effects other than accelerated wear and tear if the driver is so inclined...

I've never seen a speed bump that I would want to hit anywhere near 25 mph. Even speed humps are more like 10 mph max.

The most effective solution to speeding are narrow streets. People speed because they are under the impression that it's safe. Making the street narrower and decreasing sight lines (e.g. by adding trees) reliably causes people to slow down.

You might be right, that was not included in the study that I've read. On the other hand narrow streets may create non-remediable capacity problems in the longer run. Also, recklessness also is not completely stopped by narrow streets and trees.

At least this is what I see from my window.

But wouldn't that also make the street more dangerous? Seems like there wouldn't be a net gain of safety.

Slower speeds have an outsized effect on safety. Consider that taking 20% off the velocity of the car takes 40% off the kinetic energy of the car, and between 20% and 40% off of the distance it takes for the car to come to a stop.

It only makes the streets more dangerous if people keep speeding.

It makes the street seem more dangerous, which prompts drivers to slow down and be more cautious.

>Unfortunately, cameras increase the ticketing, but not reduce the problem that much

That's likely a feature, not a bug.

See also: sin taxes.

> 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.

My top list is 1) dogs, 2) babies, 3) lawnmowers/leafblowers/etc. This is why I hate living in areas with a lot of single-family homes. I find that kind of screeching noise pollution much more grating than loud music, trains or heavy machinery - stuff that tends to occupy a lower frequency range.

That said, it absolutely seems reasonable to have a decibel limit on vehicles, in particular to catch the antisocial people who deliberately tune their cars or motorcycles to be as obnoxiously loud as possible. Although, I was under the impression that in most places it was already illegal to register private vehicles that exceeded a maximum noise threshold, and that it would be tested during the annual vehicle inspection. Apparently not?

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.

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.

My experience in London and NYC is the opposite.

In NYC there was rarely a time that I couldn't hear a siren. I figured it was because of the very long, straight roads with unbroken sight lines and the curious way American emergency vehicles seem to leave the siren on all the time.

In London I live on a main road but only hear them a few times a day, only for a second as they go past, and rarely at night. Quite a lot of emergency vehicles drive past, but they usually have the siren turned off for the small area where they're audible to me.

> In London I live on a main road but only hear them a few times a day

Couple of hundred yards off Old Kent Road and yeah, similar experience - although they do tend to come in bunches around here, it's generally over in a minute or two.

Also have a quite opposite experience. Lived in rural Germany for years and even seeing a police car on the road was something special. You could almost never hear police cars. In all major cities I have been you could hear sirens all day, which also makes sense considering population density etc.

> 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.

Outside any major construction site in Tokyo, you will find a noise meter. I assume it is required by law and penalties are steep. The basis for my assumptions? Each time that I saw an enormous lorry approach a work site, the whole "welcoming" crew was very tense. Literally, the driver attempts to coach the lorry with the bare minimum amount of sound -- no revving the engine or changing gears. Also, I rarely heard the "back up beeps" because they will surround the truck with people in yellow safety vests. Plus, one or more people might be spraying tyres to reduce dust. It is quite a ballet to watch!

> 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).

One of the main and most disturbing sound issues we have in Germany are churches. One church near to my home rings EVERY 15 Minutes, EVERY day from 7am to 6pm. Wanting to sleep in on a Sunday? Not possible. Wanting to do a quick nap after lunch? Not possible. There have been a couple of noise complaints but somehow still nothing is changing.

Do you also pay church tax for the privilege?

I believe you can designate the state as the recipient of the 'church tax'. For example if you're atheist..

Those churches have probably been there ringing their bells since before noise complaints were a formal thing.

Why should they let people moving in (who could have known the situation) drive them out?

Times change. Watches are cheap and freely available.

> Why should they let people moving in (who could have known the situation) drive them out?

This is a bold assumption, and untrue. I was born in such a place, and had no choice as a kid to be woken up by the bells. Needless to say, I now loathe bells.

I dislike this argument so much; "I was here first, so fuck you".

And it's not like people have all that much choice where they want to live, certainly not in recent years. It should be a matter of accepting and adapting: accepting that the world doesn't revolve around you and that you will be bothered by people and organisations around you, and adapting so that we can all live reasonably happy.

How many people go to church in Germany? Turns out, not very many.[1] Should everyone adapt to a small minority "just because they've been doing it for a longer time"? Seems very unreasonable.

I wouldn't mind a church ringing its bells daily; but every 15 minutes, starting at 7am? Yikes! That's just not reasonable today.

[1]: https://www.dw.com/en/german-church-membership-continues-to-...

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.

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

Ours comes about 8am, but I don't get up until 8.30am when I am WFH. The worse thing about our bin lorry though is it has to reverse down the drive to the cluster of houses where I live so we get the constant "Beep..beep..beep" as it backs up.

>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.

I live in suburban America, and hear fire sirens go off several times a day since they are also 911 first responders for every medical emergency, there are fire stations about two-three miles from me in three different directions which might be a regional specific thing.

I lived 1000ft from a fire station that was running it's siren at least ten times a day. This was also within 1000ft of a (diesel) commuter rail station. The train horns fade into the background but the siren was always a disturbance.

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.

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!

This claim conflicts with my real life experience.

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

> 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.

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?

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.

> 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...

> Either way I can't believe that both airports are still allowed to operate, I lived under both on/off-ramps

1. Bromma Stockholm Airport Opened 23 May 1936

2. São Paulo/Congonhas–Deputado Freitas Nobre Airport - Opened 12 April 1936

Interestingly both opened 86 years ago. When did you move to near the area of their operation? Most airports are built away from conurbations which then grow around them, in my observation

In São Paulo I lived close to Congonhas from around 2006-2015. And I lived around Bromma airport in 2017-2018.

The issue with Congonhas is exactly that the city grew towards it after Brazil started to urbanise in the 50s, what I cannot believe is that even after Guarulhos was expanded there was some talks about shutting down Congonhas that never materialised, even though it would be a massive improvement for the city both regarding noise and land-use...

> what I cannot believe is that even after Guarulhos was expanded there was some talks about shutting down Congonhas that never materialised, even though it would be a massive improvement for the city both regarding noise and land-use...

The logic here:

1. Move to a property immediately near an airport

2. Notice there is aircraft noise near that airport

3. Complain about the aircraft noise

4. Demand the 80+ year old airport be shut down because the noise is a problem for you

5. Incredulity that the municipality won't shut down an airport because it annoys you

It's like shooting yourself in the foot and suing the shoe manufacturer for not being bullet resistant.

This is a bad argument for a few reasons:

A. Global airline traffic has approximately tripled in the last couple of decades[1], so even if you're arguing that someone should have known when they moved there it's not the same amount of noise as when they moved in.

See e.g. [2] for historical Kennedy airport traffic amounts, it makes no sense to compare modern-day traffic at any airport to its current traffic and noise levels.

B. It's basically a "let them eat cake" argument. Property prices in high-noise areas are lower, but poor people also deserve to have their health.

It's a given that a rich person living near an airport can afford to noise insulation to make it a non-issue (indoors at least), but that doesn't begin to address the greater public health aspect.

C. You're assuming that people are capable of making perfectly informed decisions before they move or buy property. You might know that the house is next to the train tracks, but you won't really know what affect waking up at 4am to screeching train noise will have on you until you settle in.

I live in a house constructed before WWI in a major European city. If we follow your reasoning it would be perfectly OK to heat all those houses with indoor stoves spewing unfiltered particulates into the air, with the resulting air pollution and fire risk.

After all if we wind back the clock that's what people who bought those houses initially expected, and if the default answer to how we could improve our collective living conditions was "you should have known about this when you bought it!" nothing would ever change.

But it doesn't work like that, standards change over time, and in the case of air or noise pollution bottom-up change over time tends to result in improvements through laws and regulation, and hopefully better public health as a result.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...

2. https://www.airporthistory.org/kennedy-traffic-booms.html

The level of bending my argument is worthy of a contortionist.

Lets keep the alpha bulleting

The individual I responded with the grievance moved to one of the areas a few years ago and the other less than 20 years ago. Please explain how your point relates to their position.

B. It's basically a "let them eat cake" argument. Property prices in high-noise areas are lower, but poor people also deserve to have their health.

And people with less money deserve to have choices. Also your argument is false because in most major conurbations with ready access to international air travel increases prices. Secondly the houses wouldn't exist without presence of an airport. Go to a 3rd world country and you will see shacks appear at the end of runways or near the airport built in the middle of nowhere

That's genuinely the worst argument I've ever heard and entirely based on a fictional supposition. Can you tell me honestly you know a person who thinks living on a train track doesn't involve noise? Honestly?

In what logic pathway is that my reasoning? I genuinely would pay you to explain this because its beyond ridiculous. Please explain how that is analogous to my point (even in itself it is illogical and nonsensical, but that is beside the point).

A communist plea to collective action because they set themselves on fire on purpose but sold the water to pay for the food

> The individual I responded with the grievance moved to one of the areas a few years ago and the other less than 20 years ago.

I'm referencing the "demand the 80+ year old airport be shut down" part of your comment. And assuming that you meant that for those 80+ years the airport had been a relatively constant source of noise, otherwise what's the relevance of it being there for 80+ years if not to imply that the nature of the airport has remained relatively constant for that time?

> Go to a 3rd world country and you will see shacks appear at the end of runways or near the airport built in the middle of nowhere.

Well, yes. Because there's jobs there, or the land is cheap etc. Your point seemed to be that if those people then complained about the noise they'd have no standing, I was pointing out that that's a rather black & white position to take.

> Can you tell me honestly you know a person who thinks living on a train track doesn't involve noise? Honestly?

Of course they know it's noisy, but they might not fully appreciate the long-term health effects, or perhaps they've since had children who find the noise intolerable, but had no part in the decision to move there.

I was again, responding to your argument that we should just tell those people (to paraphrase) "tough luck, you should have known when you moved in!".

> "[...]Please explain how that is analogous to my point"

I thought it was rather obvious, during the industrial revolution and early 1900s European and American cities were notoriously polluted, but they aren't today.

If we are to accept the axiom that people who moved somewhere don't have standing to complain about the environment they find themselves in it seems unlikely that anything like modern-day air pollution regulation would have been enacted.

No analogy is perfect, but it seems rather obvious to me how the increasing awareness about noise pollution today is likely to follow a similar trajectory as the increasing awareness about the health effects of air pollution did in the past, and other environmental pollution more generally.

> I'm referencing the "demand the 80+ year old airport be shut down" part of your comment. And assuming that you meant that for those 80+ years the airport had been a relatively constant source of noise, otherwise what's the relevance of it being there for 80+ years if not to imply that the nature of the airport has remained relatively constant for that time?

It simply indicates that he/she was more than aware the airport was there. And with their own information they moved there in recent modernity and thus nothing has changed in their experience from day 0 to n, I don't quite get how this is such a sticking point for you. They made an open and free and informed choice to move someplace.

> Well, yes. Because there's jobs there, or the land is cheap etc. Your point seemed to be that if those people then complained about the noise they'd have no standing, I was pointing out that that's a rather black & white position to take.

They have no standing if the parameters of operation have not changed. Absolutely zero moral high ground. None whatsoever.

> Of course they know it's noisy, but they might not fully appreciate the long-term health effects, or perhaps they've since had children who find the noise intolerable, but had no part in the decision to move there.

So all of society should hyper react to people incapable of making basic personal decisions? That isn't a good way to run a civilisation.

> If we are to accept the axiom that people who moved somewhere don't have standing to complain about the environment they find themselves in it seems unlikely that anything like modern-day air pollution regulation would have been enacted.

I genuinely don't know how someone can consider this an analogous argument. Very poor at best. Particulate pollution in urban areas is a function of density and change previously unknown to humans who learned to adapt technologies to live with it. How is that the same as someone deliberately in full awareness moving to beside an airport and then claiming the airport shouldn't exist. Nothing has changed. Airports already deploy considerable effort to limit noise e.g. approach AOE etc.

> No analogy is perfect, but it seems rather obvious to me how the increasing awareness about noise pollution today is likely to follow a similar trajectory as the increasing awareness about the health effects of air pollution did in the past, and other environmental pollution more generally.

In the UK there are bylaws in some areas to disregard noise complaints from people who have moved into the area and complain about the pub's normal noise under normal licensed hours

It is the height of social decay to have the gall and arrogance to think you alone should have a society shaped around you because you made bad decisions. Problematic to be honest.

not everyone can afford housing in the center/quiet bourgeois district of a major urban area. It's possible that those living near the airport live there because they have to, not because they want to. :)

In São Paulo's case it's a bit more insane: some of the most upscale and expensive neighbourhoods of the city are under its runways' ramps; Moema, Itaim Bibi, Vila Olímpia, Vila Nova Conceição and Jardim Europa. Some of the most expensive residential areas in the city, with penthouses in the millions of US$ are right by the airport area.

In reality in many cities the property near airports is expensive. So that doesn't work as an argument

If you've ever been to São Paulo you'd see that some of the best neighbourhoods developed after the 50s in the south zone are very close to the airport.

It's not like you have an option if you want to live close to your office in the south zone (where most of the tech companies are located at)...

Just look at a map[0] and check how many neighbourhoods surround the airport, it's unsustainable, it was place on the outskirts of a much, much smaller city at the time, it needs to be moved. The city in 1936 was nowhere close to the current size, Brazil urbanised rapidly only after the 50s-60s, you can't blame people that expanded the city there when land became scarce.

Just look at the map on street view to see how densely populated this area is nowadays, are you gonna blame all those hundreds of thousands of people?

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Congonhas-S%C3%A3o+Paulo+A...

> If you've ever been to São Paulo you'd see that some of the best neighbourhoods developed after the 50s in the south zone are very close to the airport.

... developed because there was an airport

> , you can't blame people that expanded the city there when land became scarce.

I mean you act like property and space are confusing concepts. You moved there because of convenience and value; imparted partially because of the presence of an airport.

> are you gonna blame all those hundreds of thousands of people?

If you sell Widgets and 100k people buy that widget voluntarily, technically yes, you can "blame" those 100k people for buying that widget. Conversely it is unlikely those 100k are going to blame the Widgets for ruining their lives because they know exactly what they are buying when they bought it.

You moved into the area in full knowledge of what to expect.

In many ways this is a perfect example of entitlement.

No, it developed in spite of the airport, not because of it.

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.

Too bad the city of Chicago half-assed their redevelopment of Northerly Island. Half the island is still closed because the waves kept on destroying the paved trail along the eastern side. The artificial reefs and barrier islands the engineers said were needed to avoid this weren't constructed because of budgetary reasons.

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.

Interesting. I live in central London and moved flat a few years ago.

Only noise issues i had were motorcycles with modified exhausts and emergency sirens. It's really quite confusing why they are considered necessary. New flat is high up and has 3 inch thick windows so we can't hear a thing unless its really nearby. But i have the door open sometimes and you can hear what sounds like a massive terrorist response of emergency sirens. THe you look over and see its one ambulance traversing traffic in an area with many angled buildings.

I recall years ago there was a plan to move them to white noise based systems. What happened with that

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.

France by any chance? Their sirens are much less painful in the similarly shaped streets with 8/9 story buildings

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?

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

I know it goes against the spirit of HN etiquette, but damn this comment was funny ^_^

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.

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.

What's odd is that 15-20 years ago they were trying out adding white noise to sirens, they still had the recognisable sound but also a blast of static noise. It would be interesting to know why they didn't follow through.

Also it doesn't focus all its energy on a narrow range of cilia in the inner ear. Like the difference between a small, intense light in your eyes vs. a larger, less intense light.

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.

In Northern Ireland where I am ambulances only seem to turn their sirens on when approaching junctions where they will have to go through a red light, otherwise they just have their lights on

They'll also blip them when traffic isn't getting out of the way, but that also seems incredibly reasonable. I honestly can't remember the last time I saw a "needless" siren on an emergency vehicle. But, like you, I am in the UK and the rules are different here

In Munich, they seem to regard every crossing as dangerous. :(

It really is quite obnoxious.

In Germany police and emergency vehicles are only allowed to use "Sonderrechte" (special privileges) when using both the lights and the sirens. So if they want to pass a red light or go the wrong way in a one way lane they have to use the sirens. Note that this is not technically a legal requirement as the law grants them a general exemption but the administrative regulations make this mandatory.

That said, I have seen police cars go the wrong way using hazard lights instead of the blue lights (and no sirens) so I'm not sure what the actual consequences for not following these regulations are.

I also noticed just how loud sirens are in Berlin. They're far louder than what I've heard in other European cities. Does anyone know why that is?

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.

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/

>blaring ICE systems

Internal combustion engine?

Exactly

In Car Entertainment

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!)

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.4103/0253-7176.10602...

Note: don't take it every day.

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