Barcelona residents used sensors to demonstrate high noise levels at night
bbc.com
bbc.com
OK fine about rescheduling the garbage trucks, but is this really a success? A vibrant public space has been neutered by more intrusive policing and architectural changes that encourage people to stay away? I'm somewhat sympathetic to the people in these apartments, but if this has been going on for 20 years (and why 20? why not 200?) then property values should already have adjusted. If you're living here, it's because you made the calculation about the noise and decided to rent or buy anyway, or else you didn't, and why is that the City of Barcelona's problem?
This has been happening a lot in London as the tide of gentrification washes in and sucks the life out of the local culture.
A really sad state of affairs
This has nothing to do with gentrification. Most neighborhoods that suffer this problem are working or middle class. Try doing that in rich quarters and see what happens.
The problem started long ago, aprox. 30 years. You could open a "tavern" with very few permits needed (and limited hours) or you could open a "pub", that you must isolate and comply with many regulations, and you set your hours, no matter the council.
Guess what many did and got a quick buck. Authorities turned a blind eye for the sake of tourism. When hours are enforced, people just go shop strong alcohol and drink in the streets. That generated a very bad problem years ago and there is a law against that.
> So you believe that local culture consist of a lot of people getting drunk and shouting?
Well done for reducing it with your prejudices, this is local cafe culture, which is very social. It isn’t only ‘being noisy and drunk’, that’s just a symptom. It clearly has a positive social cohesion story behind it too.
And what you deem to be culture may not be what others do. But regardless, it exists and was there before you. So, what right do you have to get rid of it?
Granted, if 100% of residents don’t want it, then that’s an argument to do something about it. But, a lot of the time it’s a handful of very vociferous residents that destroy what the majority want to keep.
If I moved to an area with a noisy local culture and found I couldn’t deal with it, I’d move; I wouldn’t try to bring an end to that culture.
You don't seem to understand that the locals are the people complaining, not the drunkards. The locals are people that are living there since forever and many of them can't choose to move.
The drinkers aren't locals. They very much care not to behave like that in their own neighborhoods so they go elsewhere to make noise.
Can you provide evidence for your assertions? I see none of what you claim in the article. Are all locals complaining? Or a few of them? Have the locals really lived there forever? Where’s the proof?
Ever lasting life aside, I suspect you’re exaggerating and the vast majority will have moved there within the past 20 years.
And how do you know the drinkers aren’t locals? Have you met them? I note from your profile you’re not from the area, so how can you be so sure there aren’t any locals there?
How local do you need to be to be allowed to stay up late and talk in any particular area? Should they live on the same square? Or, within a few streets? Should there be special police officers checking how local you are?
But anyway, my comments were mostly about the general problem of conflict between day and night walkers, not just this specific incident.
Yes. Not exclusively so, but yes. Events where drinking and shouting happen (and/or is simply the point) are a large part of culture. It might not be my cup of tea but... http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/016/845/e9d...
Why has this abuse being running for 20 years? That's a good question. But if someone threw garbage on your property, your answer won't be that "property values should already have adjusted". You just call the police, don't you?
I really hate that attitude. Not everyone works, sleeps, awakes at the same time. People who work night shifts or are natural night owls should have just as much right to enjoy their hours of awakeness as anybody else. Why are the daylight hours ‘OK for noise’, yet the evenings aren’t?
I’m a natural night owl and sometimes get awoken early by rubbish trucks, or just noisy people, shouldn’t I have the same rights?
If you’re a light sleeper, get some ear plugs
Earplugs don’t save from lowfreq noise that goes through walls, floors and beds almost intact. Disclosure: I’m sleeping from 5 to 10 times a week, not having any fixed time as a ‘morning’.
(edit: I often confuse disclaimer with disclosure)
So, minority opinion should always be ignored?
> or get some isolated nightclubs.
One of the major problems in London in the past 5 years has been the smoking ban. So these nightclubs which were previously sealed now have people outside smoking, which has caused additional conflict. It's not as simple as isolating a club or bar.
> Status quo is that most people sleep at night (and mostly drunk if not)
Wow. So people awake are night are drunks? Fantastic. They're not awake for any other reason? Like they did a night shift and want to eat late? Or they want to go shopping when they're not at work? Or ... /* lists all the reasons people do stuff during the day */
This notion that we should be awake and work during the day and sleep during the night is one that's been forced upon us. If you look into the sleeping pattern of the middle ages you'd realise it wasn't always like this, and we're not all like that [1]
> Earplugs don’t save from lowfreq noise that goes through walls, floors and beds almost intact.
I've used earplugs when in places which are noisy, I have found they're absolutely fine for this purpose. It's usually mid and high pitched sounds that are more jarring if you're trying to sleep (the human voice). Things like music which is repetitive is quite easy to tune out because of its repetitive nature.
Every minority should be satisfied, but not in the way that heavily affects majority, imo. Health and stress is not a someone’s joke.
>So people awake are night are drunks?
No. But at night you have a much higher probability to meet one who is drunk (from majority) and one is enough to disturb many. That’s what I meant trying to remain concise, sorry for this overstatement.
Unfortunately, any earplugs I tried didn’t stop lowfreq and I’m very sensitive to it (can’t sleep at all). Sleep patterns are a problem for me too, as I already mentioned. I didn’t downvote you (and it doesn’t mean anything since it’s probably emotional here), but at least you can see how much people are affected.
Edit: grammar
There is a chronic issue that being part of a group, for example by living in a city, has benefits, but it also comes with friction. Trying to find best practices for reducing the problems without destroying the fundamental value of group association is always a struggle. One best practice is you try to arrange things to align with group norms so as to inconvenience the fewest people and the reality is that most people sleep at night and work or go to school during the day.
I will add that I tend to be a night owl.
I never said I deserve quiet, I pointed out the discrepancy. It's the sleeper that desires the quiet, but different people sleep different hours of the day, especially in a city. I don't write off to my local council every time I'm awoken at 8am by a rubbish truck, even if I'd only gone to bed a few hours before. Why should people who are awake at so-called 'normal hours' be afforded any additional sympathy? And why should their desires override others? What makes them special?
Are people who are awake through the night 'lesser people'? Or not as important in your world view?
If I can sleep through the daywalker's noise, then daywalkers can sleep thru the nightwalker's noise. And if not, then they're probably living in the wrong part of the city. I find it endlessly perplexing that people will move to places known for the nightlife and then start complaining about it once there.
I'm not arguing that night owls are lesser people. I'm just saying these sorts of conflicts are basically inescapable. They have existed as long as humans have and there is no magic wand solution.
Everyone would like the entire world to work well for them as an individual. Therein lies the rub. We would all like to be able to make noise when we feel like it and to have undisturbed sleep at will where other people are expected to be quiet during that time. The reality is we have two possible choices here:
1. A small number of very powerful people can impose their will on everyone else like that while the majority live in misery.
2. We struggle to find best practices that work reasonably well for as many people as possible.
The second scenario is what most modern cultures typically shoot for. Since night owls are in the minority, policies tend to favor day people.
In theory, we could insist everyone be quiet all the time. In practice, this interferes with industry, commercial, recreation and generally having a life. So in reality we need to demarcate times when an acceptable amount of noise can happen so life can happen.
There are no simple answers. It's a complicated problem.
If the majority decided to torture the minority, or enslave them, or segregate them, I assume you would consider that immoral, right? And that the majority shouldn't just have carte blanche to do whatever they like to the minority - democracy isn't about 'screwing the minority'.
So, if the sound does really make life "a misery" then isn't that accepting of the torturing of people who have to sleep during the day? Isn't that immoral? The majority inflicting torturous sound on the minority during their sleeping hours?
Or, is it actually the case that the sound isn't really that bad, and that we should all learn to be a bit more accommodating to the fact that in a city people live and work on different schedules, and that your nighttime hours are not sacred. And using your majority position to inflict your will on other people's waking hours just so you can enjoy your sleeping hours is unjustified.
If you live in a city, in an area that's known for it's nighttime scene, I don't see why you should have any special privileges. Just like I don't expect any special privileges because I often sleep the hours that many are awake.
I said and did no such thing. I'm sorry you seem to be so angry about this, but I don't see any reason why I should be a target of that anger.
I don't intend to reply further to your comments here.
For example, take a look at this google streetview link [1]. That is The Egg nightclub, it's on York Way in Central London. It was a very industrial area when the club was built. If you pan the camera around, you'll see the residential flats that have been built in the past few years. They are now trying to get the club shut down. There are two other ex-clubs in a 100 metre walk of that point that suffered a similar fate.
This is unacceptable in my opinion, and this is what bugs me about this nonacceptance of nighttime culture - especially in areas where it's often the cause for the regeneration of an area in the first place. Those things made the area cool, the gentrified move in, they kill it.
When I said you implied that we should "write them off as irrelevant and we shouldn't even bother to look for a solution because the majority have decreed it"
I was referring to this:
> In theory, we could insist everyone be quiet all the time. In practice, this interferes with industry, commercial, recreation and generally having a life.
Where you appear to state that industry, commercial, recreation and [day time people] having a life is more important than a sizeable minority of human being's quality-of-life. Now, maybe that was a leap too far, but the implication I got was that the majority are more important and that a subset of humanity is irrelevant and should basically be ignored, because finding a solution is too hard; or even just having a bit of understanding that people have different cycles rather than forcing their world to be shut down whilst they're awake, is too hard.
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5417762,-0.125419,3a,75y,7...
As stated above, I am also a night owl. This is a different comment by me criticizing how this was handled in this case:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17220149
But I don't even actually want to read your comment in full, much less check your links, because you have left repeated ugly personal attacks of me in specific, which is not a good faith argument and is not exactly how you "win friends and influence people."
Have a nice day and all that.
There aren't any repeated ugly personal attacks, there isn't a single personal attack as far as I can tell. Nor are my responses targeted at you, I have responded to a number of people in this thread. The closest thing I can see is where I picked up on your use of language likely to bias a reader's opinion, I never picked up or discussed any aspect of you or your person though, it was entirely on topic. If there is anything I am truly sorry, that really isn't me. My arguments were entirely in good faith.
Have a nice day yourself.
This is the real tragedy, since it is a change that doesn't apply only at night. It makes the square less valuable to people 24 hours a day.
People can! Following the law and how it relates to noise pollution. Rights are a balance.
Disclaimer: US citizen who has spent more than a few weeks in Barcelona, and has seen how people abuse the commons firsthand
Sure, sounds like a lot of fun.
As a result, places where humans regularly talk to each-other in public freak us out. Why won’t they stop abusing the commons like that?
Alas, this seems to be disappearing here too; cities are importing the strange habits of gated off neighbourhoods, and giving every possible public space to private owners, who destroy its utility by trying to make money off it.
Squares and parks are supposed to have people meeting and using the public space, not for making a space prettier or as a just a transient area, if that was the case then pedestrian streets would be better to make it denser while having the same features of meeting and traffic.
Benches, chairs, steps are necessary so people can sit relatively comfortably for some time while doing other activities, I don't understand how a flat, paved square is a good thing except for displaying flower beds.
Aside from breaking the law, how does one abuse a common area?
Not implying this is what you’re saying, but I’ll never understand people who try to imply commons areas should only exist for the whims of certain classes of people.
I lived near a park in Minneapolis a few years back and one of my obnoxious neighbors were trying to get laws passed to change park rules because they didn’t like the large “poor looking” family who had a weekly cookout in the park on Sundays. She tried so hard to rally the neighborhood into joining her quest...
I kept asking her, “If you don’t like public areas, if you want to control who uses what and how they use it, why on earth would you move into a densely populated area, directly across the street from a public park?” I mean, it was a fairly pricey neighborhood so she had options, I’ll never understand why she didn’t move into one of those suburban neighborhoods with a homeowners association— those are tailor made for people who want to micromanage others and can’t handle living amongst the public. Like, stay out of cities if you’re this type of person...
These plazas are commonly located in the old town, so a lot of inhabitants might have inherited the properties. Also, it's sometimes hard to judge how loud an area is really going to be before signing the contract - especially the night-life.
I recently rented a new apartment in a crowded street and while it was certainly a mistake to move here, I didn't expect it to be _that_ loud since when we were there for the apartment viewings there were also a lot of other interested parties and it was distracting from the street noise.
I really wish there would be a project to distribute those noise-tracking devices and make the realtime data available to the public. It would definitely influence buying/renting decisions and help for city planning as I think this serious problem is only tackled on the surface and it brings down quality of living.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-supes-back-music-...
Modern technology allows for acoustically isolating virtually any kind of housing. (Provided the windows are shut.) Acoustic retrofitting is expensive, but so is losing the tax revenue from a vibrant public space. A better solution would have involved reducing noise levels inside residents’ homes without smothering the plaza.
(Reminds me of a poster I saw at a club, once. Paraphrasing, “Al sees apartment. Al sees club. Al rents apartment. Al spends all his free time making noise complaints. Don’t be Al.”)
Could there be other problems with everyone using air conditioning all the time?
Windows don’t need to be shut all the time. Just when I’m sleeping, or want some quiet. (I don’t live in an acoustically-isolated environment, either.)
(That said, I and most people I know in Manhattan run air conditioners more or less constantly, while we are in the apartment, all summer.)
If you take into account that most of the people sitting on the floor of the square bought their beers in the convenience store and probably paid less than one Euro for each of them, I don't think that the state will loose a massive amount of income via taxes.
On the other hand, I know that measuring everything by the economical peformance is a really common thing to do in the other side of the Atlantic, but the neigbours have the right to be able to sleep, even with the windows open. Those squares are not zoned as industrial area, so they are meant to be silent at night. By law.
I lived in Barcelona for 5 years, and for the first 18 months my wife and I lived right by the Santa Maria del Mar, a church in a square that is one of the main tourist areas in Barcelona. Our neighbours in the building included an old couple (80's, probably) who had lived there forever, and a 92 year old lady who was born in the building. Our landlords had inherited the place from their parents, who had been there forever too. Barcelona is that sort of place, it has changed incredibly quickly - before the olympics in '92, apparently it was unsafe to walk around that area during the day, but in the last decade or so it's become super hip.
We didn't complain, we just moved, but I would absolutely support reducing the nightlife around that area - the noise was insane. And it was pretty much all caused by tourists, not locals, and Barcelona is on a big drive to prioritise the locals in general. Reducing the nightlife, or even just keeping the noise at night to reasonable levels, wouldn't make the space any less vibrant during the day or even at night at reasonable hours, and would give a lot of relief to residents.
"- We do not get used to noise, but our ears "filter out" unpleasant sounds and cope as well as they can with the daily exposure to intensive noise.
- People are unaware of the damage caused by exposure to high levels of noise due to a lack of information.
- The damage affects not only our hearing ability. It may also appear in the form of insomnia, tiredness, lack of concentration, lack of attention at work, lack of efficiency, and even hypertension, heart problems and digestive disorders."
Nobody in authority listerned or even checked until then.
My surprise upon my first days in the West was that no Western country seem to have them.
During my stay in Vancouver I got to know well the people who were reving their lambos on West Georgia in 3am.
As a foreigner living here, I try to accept the noise as part of the culture, even though the noise annoys me. So it is great to read of locals actively campaigning to reduce noise levels.
On Friday I was in the very plaça (Plaça del Sol) mentioned in the article with a friend, and it was crowded and loud. All the tables were full, people were sitting on the steps, and indeed all over the plaça. My friend said, "it must be bad for the residents". It is good to know at least one plaça in Barcelona is now moving the crowds on after 11:30pm.
Catalan is not a dialect of Spanish, if anything it would be a dialect of Occitan. And seeing how condescending are hurtful you are trying to be I suspect you already knew that.
> Why do people waste their time with that?
It's the native language of ~5 million people. We learn it for the same reason Swedish people learn Swedish, Danish people learn Danish, etc. It's just the language we speak in our country.
There is already a de facto international language (which is not Spanish BTW), and we also learn it.
What would probably happen is that the people being noisy will appologize, try to be more quiet, forget about the incident after about 5 minutes, and go back to the previous amount of noise until some other neighbour complains.
calleu d'una puta vegada
There is at least two words, calleu, and vegada that don't exist in any Portuguese I've encountered. Also, d'una is... not something I've seen in Portuguese before.
But I'm a new speaker so I may be missing something.
I found this slang for shut the fuck up in Portuguese, not sure how cromulent it is: https://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-portuguese/shut-the-fuc...
I'm Canadian but living in Barcelona, in El Born district. I had no idea drunk Brits on vacation could make so much noise at nights. I live above a cafe/bar frequented by locals, and I have no issue with their late night (late night for this Canadian anyhow, around 10-midnight) enjoyment of tapas, wine and friends. Sure the Spaniards aren't exactly known for being quiet people, but it's not unreasonable levels of noise and they're quite quite after midnight. Its the bloody tourists that fly down on a 30 quid Ryanair flight with their lads for a weekend of fun in Barcelona and scream bloody marry at 3 am that get under my skin.
I did make the mistake of living in a busy tourist area once, it's not a mistake I ever intend to repeat.
I will, however, apologise for the behaviour of my fellow countrymen and, if it's any comfort, please understand that a lot of us hate the 'drunken Brits' as much as everyone else does.
From my perspective the main noise pollution problem is fast moving cars, which have obvious fixes. People loudly hanging out in plazas seem like a more difficult problem, and not even something I'm all that comfortable with characterizing as a problem. But maybe turning down lighting could be part of the solution? Or are places people hang out loudly at already not lighted?
I might even predict the opposite effect: drinking on the street, although popular, is illegal in Spanish cities. Darker plazas would make it easier to hide drinking from the police, and could attract even more people.
The only mode of transportation that's "practically silent" is bicycles. (Pedestrians are silent, too, except for those drunk idiots who like to loudly argue before my house at night.)
> Buses, trucks, trains, and motorcycles all make drastically more noise.
Motorcycles are THE WORST.
> Especially when the buses are operating their airbrakes and audible announcements,
WTF? Announcements happen inside the bus, not outside. (Except if there is a blind person on the platform. They have devices that make the tram or bus announce its destination. But blind people are exceptionally rare, especially at night.)
> trains are blowing their horns as they crawl away from stations
WTF? I only ever see trains blowing their horns when approaching one of the few ungated level crossings in the countryside which have not been outfitted with gates yet.
And I'm surprised that the buses don't adopt the same tech that we have, where blind people carry devices that trigger the announcement.
So, the same policy of hostile architecture that gets used to try to be unwelcoming of homeless people can be applied to other demographics and other social problems. Color me not thrilled with this approach.
I've just never had the kind of life that involved lots of alcohol and loud parties. So my admittedly biased tendency is to feel there is no tremendous value in fostering such things. But as other people have noted, this doesn't just impede loud carousers. It also prevents other kinds of just hanging out with people.
The article notes that the nearby commercial development basically sold pizza and beer and suggested this was influenced by the nighttime activities here. It seems to me that trying to get more of a commercial mix in the area could help or otherwise try to foster evening activities other than drinking, hanging in the plaza for free and being loud.
There was one charity that created a midnight basketball program to combat the problem of inner city youth having nothing to do but be troublemakers. It's not like you need to reinvent the wheel here, so to speak. There are examples out there for how to resolve similar kinds of problems in a win/win fashion that gives the offending parties something better to do instead of merely vilifying them.
In any case, this is not special at all. Every European city has regulations about pollution, including noise pollution.
Edit: I googled and found this: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87833/outdoor-ac... -- it seems that there are limits of physics which make such noise-canceling loudspeakers infeasible. It's a pity.
Come think of it, this is not the first time I've gone through the whole evaluating idea-thought process and even sometimes reaching "I can't believe nobody thought of this before!" before realizing that I read something into a title that wasn't there.
Basically in areas where loitering by teenagers is perceived to be a problem, playing a high frequency sound tends to be unpleasant to them while older folks often don't hear it.
I live in a high-rise next to a motorway in London and at 3am I can measure the noise as 60-70db using a mobile phone noise meter (inaccurate but indicative).
I investigated the feasibility of using my stereo speakers as noise-cancelling for the room... mics on the window sills and the speakers to reduce the noise in the room. I figured it would work well enough to remove the constant background hum of the road. I was wrong. It doesn't really work, and it is just noise upon noise.
The best I've managed to do is hang materials inside of the windows (quilts, sheets) and have been able to knock off just under 10db of noise in the best case (when it's just the drone of vehicle volume rather than specific engines or sirens).
The downside is that my high-rise is a high fire-risk tower block and I'm trading one life affecting issue (noise pollution) for another (fire risk) as now I have flammable materials inside my windows. Hard to know which affects sleep more, certainly the noise is the most real and present issue.
Some nice thick shag pile carpets, and wall-hung rugs will also help. If you like posters or pictures, consider using a block frame and putting some sound adsorbent material between the paper and the wall.
Double glazed windows are your best bet, but probably quite hard to install in a high rise. Ideally you want the ones where each glass layer is a slightly different thickness.
Otherwise get some custom fit earplugs from an audiologist, if it's just sleeping that is a problem. They can even fine tune them, so that voice frequencies pass through, but other frequencies are blocked.
Though stopping or masking all noise carries risk by itself... being unable to hear what fire alarms we do have.
still doubt they'd stop a fire alarm.
Standard ear protection attenuates about 15-30db.
I bought polycarbonate transparent sheet (firesafe) that can be attached to the window wall with a help of magnetic adhesive tape. http://goldstarplasticsireland.ie/secondary-glazing-system.h...
It is effective in blocking mid and high frequencies, still some low freq energetic noise comes in. Before I had to sleep few nights in a week with wax earplugs, now I manage to sleep normally.
> People may not want everything monitored and who decides and shapes this agenda is a big question for future urban democracy.
That is actually my main problem with those fab labs: As collecting data becomes a means of power, the fabs are often an attempt to grab that power. I.e. the people running them are almost always heavily politically aligned towards one extreme of the spectrum and thus the labs themselves are ideological echo chambers (at least in my country).
No wonder it produces agendas like these:
> "We are trying to build a new productivity model for society, creating a new sustainable economy in cities where people can prototype and test ideas,"
Like this (an implied technical ability of the masses) is ever going to happen. Especially if the ones advocating it, are either shunning people outside their belief-system or "promoting" the ability with projects and agendas, no one outside their belief-system is even remotely interested in.
Consider affluent neighbourhood residents going into these labs to print their own noise detectors because of their annoyance with the asylum-seeker-home next door. Not gonna happen.
And since Detroit was mentioned: What if those youngsters in plaça del sol where the ones equipped with sensors?