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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

I think there’s often a belief that louder motorcycles are safer because cars will be more likely to notice them.

Though I think the small cheap engines in scoters or small bikes are loud because making them quieter would be more expensive.

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I've heard the safety argument before and I find it astonishing. If you can't drive safely without making a noise audible from miles away, your vehicle isn't fit for the road. However this argument does hint at what bikers are often doing, which is racing on public roads and massively breaking speed limits.

I think modern scooters are also held to strict noise standards, the noisy ones have been made noisy deliberately.

I think if you talk to responsible motorbike riders, you’ll easily find people who have had near or actual collisions because because a car didn’t see them and the driver wasn’t trying hard enough to check for the places a motorbike might be. It’s easy for a motorbike to be hidden behind the A-pillar of a car if that car is entering a roundabout and the bike is going round, for example, so if a driver isn’t paying enough attention and moving their head to see round blind spots, they can hit a bike. Similarly for any manoeuvre that involves crossing lanes: drivers often don’t notice smaller motorcycles or scooters (or cyclists).

This happens regardless of the noise the motorcycle is emitting though. In slow traffic, the advantages of noise are low. At speed, you can't hear the engine of the bike before its too late. Cars are way too well isolated nowadays for the noise to be a major factor in collisions with bikes in my experience.

I’m not trying to claim that the loudness theory is correct. If I try to imagine what it’s like to be a biker who has had one or several near-misses/accidents due to careless drivers, whose biker friends espouse the loudness theory, it’s pretty easy for me to see that person feeling a louder bike would be better.

And yet cyclists don't install loudspeakers so cars would notice them. A motorbike is more visible than a bicycle and can go with the flow speed so unless one drives dangerously it should be safer than cycling even without loud engine.

Cyclists are slower and plenty of cyclists will have had actual collisions or near-misses with eg car doors being suddenly opened into the bike line, cars cutting across the bike lane without looking, and so on.

Both riding a bicycle and driving a motorbike is less safe than driving a car because they are harder to notice and less protected but there should be some compromise between safety for a biker and noise pollution or a large are around the road.

As to cyclists to be slower: 1. a motorbike driver can choose to go below speed limit is the situation / road configuration makes it unsafe to go fast. 2. low speed is not always safer - on a straight road outside intersections speed of the flow (or just below) is safer.

This would hold more ground if the people who say that wore full gear and full face helmets. They tend not to.

In practice, even a loud engine is practically silent until it passes in front of you.

I ride a pushbike a lot and I only hear those stupid motorbikes right as they go past me. Even the headwind from cycling at a moderate speed like 30 km/h is enough to completely drown the motorbikes out. Usually all they do is scare the shit out of me as they come flying past.

I imagine inside modern cars that completely seal you off from the outside you wouldn't be able to hear them at all.

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