Do due diligence before picking a place to live, folks.
Freight trains are probably the least bad way for freight to enter a city, given their efficiency and relative greenness. But they do need to be unloaded, maintained, and turned around somewhere, and wherever that is going to happen is going to be noisy.
I am guessing this particular incident concerns the LIRR's coach yard in the aptly-named neighborhood of Hudson Yards, or NJT/Amtrak's yard in Sunnyside. Either way, it doesn't have much to do about bringing goods into the cities. This is instead a good-old commuters-versus-residents thing.
The neighborhood in question has 1 bedrooms starting at $2.6k a month, even after COVID depressed rental prices. People are by no means being forced to live there because they have no place left to go.
California stopped having prescribed bans as frequently because they would violate air quality rules and now they have wildfires so intense they need to evacuate heavily populated areas every year. Complaining about freight noise from trains would be a net negative if what you replaced it with was an equivalent amount of trucks, which are far worse for urbanism.
Honestly, aside from a few obvious things, "due diligence" is often pretty much impossible.
If you move into an apartment in the winter, there's zero way of knowing that teens like to blare window-shakingly loud music in the park across the street every other day in the summer.
Or that the seemingly innocuous speed bump in front of your building will cause the 10's of garbage trucks that race by at maximum speed at 2 am each night to rattle and bump with such a force that each one wakes you up.
Or that a month after you move in, you get a new neighbor next door who blares bass-thumping music all day long while you're trying to work.
Or that the building next door starts to undergo gut renovation and welcome to jackhammering all day long.
Except for super-obvious stuff like is this a street with noisy bars/clubs, or yeah an active train yard -- which isn't even "due diligence" it's just keeping your eyes open -- there really isn't much you can do ahead of time. You just have to accept it'll always be a gamble.
I would assume there are certain maximum sound volume regulations in France as they exist in many places.
“tradition” is all too commonly used as an argument to break the law. I do not believe it should play a factor at all whether something happened in the past, merely whether it violate the law.
If France have nationwide rules about sound levels and the rooster exceeded them, then that is all the diligence a man needs to have done. One may certainly expect that the government upholds the law uniformly throughout one's country.
It's not as if France doesn't have issues with perceived political elitism, given the existence of the yellow vests.
If laws could be so easily ignored, we might as well do away with them.
Like, if I move somewhere where I know that the noise regulations mandate low noise after 10pm and there's a pub making a racket at midnight, of course I'm going to report it, the fact that it's been there for 200 years is literally completely irrelevant.
Lots of well meaning laws have unintended consequences. A large contributing factor to out-of-control Californian wildfires was that prescribed fires to thin the amount of combustible material were often stopped by the air quality board.
All of our industrial equipment should be designed with this in mind.
Back up beepers are considerably louder than they need to be.
Weirdly, the police sirens in Germany towns like Frankfurt are incessant - it's a very piercing sound, they use them often, all day long, and the sound bounces through the walls of the town which is 5 stories everywhere and narrow streets. In a North American city you rarely actually hear sirens - maybe for firetrucks.
The low hum of gasonline engines really adds up, the electrics are so much nicer that way but I fear accidents.
Tom Scott has a fascinating video that describes how this is changing: https://youtu.be/fa28lIGuxq8
The worst bit is that sound walls, at least the ones deployed in America, do not even really fix the problem, because they can reflect sound (so they may reduce immediate area noise but increase it farther away). You would probably want something pretty much like a tunnel.
Frankly houses for sale & rent should come with a sound recording of the last two weeks of use
Dilligence is hard as heck; who knows if there's som neighbor that habitually does carpentry at 2AM or whose dog goes apeshit a couple times a week or a delivery service va blasting it's noisemaker at 5AM.
I agree about doing due diligence but a lot is hard to account for. We are so much at the mercy of the outside world. Maybe the neighbors AC sucks & reverbs something wicked. How would a winter home buyer find that out? Or maybe it's the heater that's a problem.
And it just doesn't feel like we're in a world where people tend to be open to working together to improve things.
https://jalopnik.com/the-absurd-community-fight-that-could-c...
Short version: People move in next to an established race track and learn they don't like the sound of race tracks. You'll be shocked at what happens next!
If you want a laugh, do a Google Image search for "laguna pipes", to see the elaborate contraptions people bolt to the back of their track cars to redirect exhaust noise away from the sound meter to keep them from blowing sound.
I've never had an issue, as the car I track is quiet and stock. But plenty of stock vehicles made in the past few decades are well past the limits already, and I feel the frustration of those who used to have a "legal" car, but keep getting tripped up by the lowering and lowering of sound limits.
Overall, I simply cannot fathom those who are annoyed by the sound of the track. It's on a HUGE expanse of land. The complainers must be many hilltops away. I don't doubt the sound carries for many miles, but it's very much "background noise I choose to be angered by and whine about" versus actual nuisance.
I was at COTA for the inaugural F1 race, and had a fantastic time, and also traveled there to see Aussie V8 Supercars there.
That said, I'm not sure I'd want to drive the track in a street car. I've driven it in sims I'm not sure it's great at typical road car speeds.
At the moment, in France, the racing track of Albi, the track of which runs around the airport track, is being sued and fined for the noise. The track exists since 1960, there were only a few farms around in those days. People built beside the circuit later (building only started slowly in the 80s), and now they complain. And even now they keep on building right there, packing each empty lot with new houses!
People moved in and then the race track tried to get noise restrictions from the 1950s changed to benefit them.(increasing no-muffler days(wtf?) and opening race course on sunday)
From your linked propaganda piece:
> restrictions on use set in the 1950s.
I'd be heavily on side of people wanting a peaceful place to live than to cater to ignorant arseholes who don't want to use mufflers cos they like the sound it makes.
Oh that’s going to go over well. Some people in my neighborhood tried suing and now we have every train blowing their horns through this entire section of the city. A dozen times a day and many of those at night.
It’s hard for me to not laugh at my neighbors every time it happens.
https://www.bjtonline.com/business-jet-news/runway-removal-t...
Further expansion was approved in 2018, when one of the local MPs — Boris Johnson, who had promised to "lie down in front of bulldozers" to prevent expansion — was conveniently on a trip abroad during the vote it Parliament.
(The areas of London overflown are a mix of wealthy, average and poor-ish, left-voting and right-voting, it's far too large an area to wave away as X group of people complaining.)
Made worse because well off areas tend to be in the hills, and so planes are lower over the ground.
Do your due diligence when developing industrial properties, folks.
Because I was always wondering how that would go
Hudson Yards completely caps the yard over with buildings so I don’t think you can hear it at all.