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Comment by snomad | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see this posted, I ask about noise. Dense housing near rapid-transit, particularly rail, has led to lots of people getting exposed to massive volumes of noise, even at night. This is the type of long-term negative that get people to move out to the suburbs (e.g. self-defeating the policy) or call for more construction such as sound walls. You can see Reno for a perfect example of this. Everyone moved out to the burb, traffic sucks, then they ended up just building sounds walls anyways.

Does any piece of this legislation deal with the inherent problem of rapid-transit noise + dense housing?

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> inherent problem of rapid-transit noise

What inherent problem? Rapid transit is certainly quieter than vehicle traffic. Noise pollution comes from sirens and heavy trucking, not public transportation.

When they re-route the rapid transit bus 1 block so it ends up going down my street during street repairs, my kid and my wife and myself get regularly woken up starting at 4:45am. Then the bus keeps going till midnight. Yippee what fun!

If you can notice people at a bus stop outside your house then you need better sound insulation. If you want to keep your windows open at night and have that be quite then move the the middle of nowhere.

I say this as someone that lived near an airport, even guests did not notice unless the windows where open.

Definitely. If it really bothers you, you can invest in double-paned windows and a good ventilation system. I used to live right under the San Diego flight path [1] and slept beautifully every night.

1. Not my video, but my neighborhood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_M8PCO3BvE

The state-of-the-art arrived at triple-paned by now.

If a bus is your noise threshold you should be living on a farm, not one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the country.

I assumed rail is part of this bill, my bad.

Buses regularly have speakers announcing the stop (85th and X) that can be heard at quite a distance.

I guess people think this is a joke or nimbyism, but it is a legit concern. We all know by know how important sleep is to health. well, that rapid transit noise (even bus) is a factor. Trucks and cars, late at night, have a flow. Buses stop, the speaker garbles all too loudly, air brakes hiss, and the slow elephantine weight of the vehicle is dragged into motion by a guttural engine rumble.

Surface level rail often has horn-sounding mandates near road crossings. Caltrain and freight raik through the Peninsula does, for example.

We should upzone everything!

Noise sucks, but for some people it's the right tradeoff. We should allow people to choose that if they want.

Dense housing near rapid transit, particularly rail, has led to lots of people getting exposed to massive volumes of noise, even at night. You can see Reno for a perfect example of this.

Reno, Nevada hasn't had a rail system since 1927, and there is exactly one "rapid" bus line (out of 30 routes total) Are you really arguing that significant numbers of downtown residents were so outraged by inescapable bus noise that they migrated to...whatever constitutes a "suburb" of Reno, or are you suggesting that Reno is the suburb people were fleeing to, and if so, from where? Or is there some other Reno we're talking about here?

if noise deters others and means i can buy a condo, cool beans. i’ll get some earplugs.

Sound walls, as implemented in SV, don't reduce noise, they merely displace it. I don't understand why they didn't choose only sound-absorbing materials... but they didn't. The noise in Kevin Moran Park (next to Hwy 85), originally negligible, became a serenity-killing din.

What's so bad about building sound walls?

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