Noise pollution hurts the heart
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Seems like a convincing argument to me for car-free spaces, although honestly I just wish we had stronger social norms against unnecessarily using a car's horn.
They would then stop the car and actually talk with them, but honking was somehow mandatory
This is a low enough cost that I bet people would use and hold their horn for longer, to show their annoyance in $.
Fun thing is, when I am in the city, I like opening the windows in summer and car noises don't bother me much because it's normal and part of the scenery.
But then I am perfectly capable of putting on my pajamas past 10PM, climb down the stairs from the flat to the street, knock on the car's window and ask the driver to turn off the engine because the low humming noise I hear in my bed is driving me insane. It's when the sound is useless and could be easily prevented that I get crazy. Misophonia very much also.
But there's also some speech patterns that get on my nerves in public transport and it's not really (at least most of the time) a lack of consideration from the people though (but it happens way less often).
However, stuff like
- Modified motorcycle that makes an insane amount of noise for no intelligent reasons
- People playing bassy music that resonate across the walls of the entire building (low frequencies)
- Constant pop music everywhere you go
Are seriously getting on my nerves.
I've read about an experiment where increasing the noise level of carhorns on the inside of the car reduced horn usage significantly. Maybe there's some smart way to use tweaks like that in future regulation.
Even then, sometimes I get woken up by the low frequencies of large trucks idling (snow removal operations, mostly). The vibrations are not even felt in my ears but through my entire body.
Have you tried it? Do you consider it would block the loud snoring of a large man?
The website says it's not active noise canceling but noise masking. My ear plugs are masking 38dB and the snoring makes it through. So I am worried that I would end up hearing heavy snoring with a musical background.
At around the same time, the AC in the office developed a constant hum. This drove me nuts.
When I went to my parents' house in the suburbs, I could hear the silence and really, really enjoy it. I realized that basically, during a regular day, I could never get to spend a moment in silence. There would always be some kind of noise: traffic outside my apartment window, metro / bus / traffic during the commute, random people talking / AC hum at the office.
This made me wonder whether all the people that I see around me being constantly angry and "on the edge" might be that way in part because they basically never catch a break. They are constantly under this continuous noise. And I don't think we can really get used to it. I remember a friend said that I'd get used to the noise when I would complain. It's more than 3 years later, and it still annoys to me no end. I may sometimes forget the noise is there, but I think it still has its effect on my stress level. It's not like getting used to lifting weights or something to which the body adapts.
Tokyo despite being one of the densest and busiest cities in first world countries is incredibly clean, quiet, and safe.
The cars that are on the road tend to be quite new, which is a result of a stringent mandatory inspection after a car gets older that makes it more economical to export the car and buy a new one. So cars are typically in excellent repair, with a small economical engine. The driving culture is generally conservative. People don't race each other, compete for the loudest exhaust, roll coal, etc.
No joking: I use to work, sleep, public transport, and every time I want some piece of mind.
I feel the same way but with the sentence stopping here
However, general motor traffic noise - tyres, engines, displaced air - is loud enough to be a serious problem anyway.
I don't know how we solve this. Car dependency is so ingrained in our collective consciousness; is it politically feasible to find a way out?
Noise cameras. Just like a speed camera, but it measures noise levels and issues a ticket in the mail. There's unfortunately a regressive element (some people can't afford to fix their noisy exhaust), but I see no reason not to issue tickets for noise outside of normal hours, e.g. 7am-10pm.
Where I live now (Seattle) neither are common but traffic congestion and impatient drivers are. Horns aren’t used for safety, they’re used to communicate crowded aggressive driving.
I agree with GP that for this scenario restricting cars overall is a better solution. The laws on the books certainly apply but they’re only enforceable in a meaningful way if you have traffic cops on every arterial. And that’s not something I think anyone wants.
> I'd even go so far as to posit that the link discussed between noise and heart health is actually via psychological stress, rather than physiological stress.
Why is this even a distinction? The psychological stress leads to the physiological stress impact on heart health.
I wasn't a fan of loud noises before my hyperacusis appeared, but now I've grown to absolutely despise motorcycle drivers who seem to feel obligated to make as much noise as possible in dense areas, accelerating as strong as they can regardless of common sense and speed limits. I won't even mention those doing this late at night throughout the city, not worried about waking up hundreds if not thousands of people.
I've moved out of a big city to be less exposed to traffic noise, unfortunately the area I'm now in is coastal and often has said drivers "enjoying" the coastline in their own unique way as soon as the sun is out.
I hope that this major public health issue will be tackled in the upcoming years, and that strong limitations on engine noise will be put in place, enforced by sound radars, heavy fines, and incentives to go electric.
I've considered reaching out to my neighborhood council about it, but I'll probably have moved again due to motorcycles before it goes up to the city/county/department/region...
The issue, of course, is that there's no enforcement.
Maybe a year or so ago there was some campaign about this with police stopping people in Paris who were too loud. Everyone was talking about how the noise is unacceptable and how there would be a crackdown. This lasted a whole 2 days until the cameras tired, and all of a sudden it became acceptable again, and has been ever since.
So we have a badly designed law which is, as you mentioned, not even enforced. Sounds like France indeed.
Basically, as you said, there's the "official" test, which is dynamic (the bike has to be moving) and involved enough to not be practical for everyday controls by police.
But there's also a "static" test, for the purpose of facilitating police controls. The meat of it, from the article, is below. The parameters for this test are given on the registration slip of the vehicle (expected sound level / RPM).
---
The sound should be measured with a microphone placed as follows:
* At an angle of 45º to the vehicle's longitudinal axis
* At 50 cm from the muffler
* At the height of the highest point of the muffler and at least at 20 cm from the ground
* If the bike has mufflers on both sides, testing should be done with two microphones, one on each side
Testing conditions:
* Testing must be done at 50% of the nominal power RPM [not max RPM]
* If max RPM is 5000 or less, testing must be done at 75 % of nominal power RPM
* There must be at least 3m of free space around all sides of the vehicle
---
This level is higher than the one in the official test, but it doesn't really mean anything. The official test is done wide open throttle starting at 50 km/h, so it should reflect fairly well the actual noise produced when riding around town. The static test isn't involved in the homologation of the vehicle, it's just there for the police to be able to check that the vehicle hasn't been tampered with.
The 100 HP law has been removed around 2016 because the EU said it was it against free trade in the block. I'm not really sure how that works and if a vehicle must only comply with EU regulations in order to be sold in any and every country. As a biker, I'm happy it was removed. It was just silly and useless. A 100 HP bike, even a heavy one like a Hayabusa is powerful enough to give you a bad day if you have no idea what you're doing [0].
More related to the issue at hand, limiting was very easy to circumvent and practically impossible to verify without putting the bike on a dyno. Older, non fuel injected models only had some kind of mechanical limiting for admission. My bike was limited by the ECU which is trivial to swap. Actually in my particular case it's a bit more involved since the coded key is tied to the ECU, so you'd have to also change the key. The ECU is just a black box with a bunch of connectors. It doesn't say anything as to what it does.
It's more or less the same issue with mufflers. They're pretty trivial to change and even if they're sold as street legal, it's very easy to remove a capsule to "open" it up.
However, this is much easier to control than the ECU mapping. Just put out a mic and measure the sound level. Is it above the value in the registration? It's illegal. Done.
But I think it's just much easier to enforce speed limits. Just set up a speed camera and take pictures of the guys passing by. You don't even have to stop them. And, as a bonus, it counts as "doing something" for traffic safety.
---
[0] One good thing in France (and maybe the whole EU, now) is that getting a motorcycle license is not as easy as the car license. But in traffic stats, motorcycles are usually counted in the category of "2 wheelers" (which actually includes some trikes). The issue here is that not everyone has an actual motorcycle license. And, related to the power issue, it would seem that "inappropriate speed" was a factor in more accidents involving small bikes (those not requiring the full motorcycle license) than bigger ones. Below is a (2008) study showing that:
* "small bikers" are more often the cause of the accident than "big" ones.
* big bikes, when the cause of the accident was a "loss of control", were on average going 15 km/h above the posted speed limit. Pretty much any 100 HP motorcycle can go above 145 km/h (highway speed limit is 130).
http://www.fema-online.eu/riderscan/IMG/pdf/in_depth_-_franc...
In some other cases like mine it's unfortunately not as likely to disappear, so protect your ears and wear earplugs at concerts or anywhere noise is at uncomfortable levels.
TIL. Thanks.
Is the sensitivity you describe specific to certain sounds? If so, that could be some kind of hyperacusis as it can be very focused on certain frequencies. Mine is mild/moderate so I can tolerate a loud discussion for a while, but stuff like broken glass is simply unbearable, it feels like the glass is breaking inside my ears and usually makes them painful for a couple of hours.
If I really needed sleep I would get myself drunk for a week straight, that was the only time I slept through the night. But the chronic lack of sleep and sleep disturbance made me generally angry and quick to explode at every little thing. I was really miserable for years. Luckily I saved enough money to move to a quiet cul de sac.
I honestly can't wait for electric cars to come en mass, even if it costs the environment the same or more than ICE, because you can't complain about noise pollution in a way that someone would take you seriously. Everyone just waves their hand "it's just a loud car passing by", but they don't see the negative consequences that has for both mental and physical health.
I religiously wear the best earplugs and face mask I can find to sleep. Even in controlled environments, they make a hell of a difference.
Mask-wise I really like the Tempur-pedic sleep mask. I dislike their mattresses intensely but the mask is really good, especially for airplane sleeping.
I also tried white noise generators, but those were only effective against neighbours and not outside traffic. In the end, knocking myself out with a bottle of wine was the only thing that worked. That's not something I would do regularly, but once every few months when the lack of sleep would start to affect me badly in every possible way.
After I moved to a quiet place, my life improved tenfold in a space of few weeks. The only thing that stayed with me is an elevated sensitivity to noise (a kind of trauma but instead of being afraid I get mad at the noise origin).
Most people wouldn't use it, because they've basically decided which city/town (bc of work/family) and are just trying to narrow down which home. But it'd be very useful to me, personally, as someone who can do my job from anywhere. Also, I'd imagine it's impossible to get detailed enough data for some of this stuff. Noise being the toughest, I'd bet, though maybe you could approximate based on various factors (traffic, etc).
Are there any standards for soundproofed construction like there are for energy-minimized construction?
> The STC is useful for evaluating annoyance due to speech sounds, but not music or machinery noise as these sources contain more low frequency energy than speech.
There's also Room Criteria or Noise Criteria, which measures ambient noise from 16Hz to 4kHz, but not transmission.
My dream is to have greater than 60dB of isolation across 20-20k, and preferably more like 80+. I'd like to be able to sleep inside if there's a marching band, a motorcycle tour, an airshow, and a hurricane all going on outside at the same time (and, in reverse, to be able to do all those things inside without bothering the neighbors).
I want to look at the neihborhoods that all the people who don't give a crap about anything are clicking on.
Listening to jake brakes and a train a few times a day is a lot bad for my health than easily irritated neighbors.
Walk Score isn't an exact science, but is still a useful measure.
Personal story, there were workers using an extremely loud diesel powered crane to redo the facade of our building. They without fail began work at 705, outside of a building of 100 mostly young people, dozens of whom were still in bed. Why do construction crews schedules, 3 people, get precedence over the dozens of residents? My personal stress and anger was peaked every time that crane turned on, I wanted to shout at the workers by the end.
The coup de grace was the turning on of the crane at 630 on Saturday morning, someone had bribed them to lift their own personal AC unit on top of the building. Bathrobed me went out and told them a few words. They responded they wanted to get it done early so it wouldn't bother people. WTF!
You have to realize that no law, no police will protect you against people who have no consideration for their fellow citizens. There is only suffering, fleeing or fighting back - that's it. Make your choice.
On a thread about air pollution a few days ago [1] I mentioned sensor.community [2]. They are promoting crowdsourced environmental data, including noise and I’m currently building their DNMS so I can contribute [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915103 [2] https://sensor.community/en/ [3] https://sensor.community/en/sensors/dnms/
When I tried magnesium glycinate to help with sleep, I happily discovered my daytime sensitivity to loud sounds improved too. Turns out this is common: https://psychcentral.com/blog/living-with-extreme-sound-sens...
> In my practice, 85 percent of my patients came to me with a severe magnesium deficiency. A deficiency in this mineral often leads to anxiety, mood swings, personality disorders, sound sensitivity, light sensitivity, and insomnia. Magnesium has been shown to mitigate the neurotransmitter glutamate while easing the anxiety and anger experienced by someone with most types of sound sensitivity. Chelated magnesium is one of the best types of mineral supplements as it is very small and easy for the body to absorb and make use of.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end...
Everything Is Getting Louder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21229540 - Oct 2019 (305 comments)
My pet peeve are jets. Living within ~5 miles of an air force base, or any major airport, is terrible. Everyone stops what they're doing for the for whatever duration a plane is in the area. Local and state politicians are powerless to do anything because of "the jobs".
I live on the flight path from the White House to Camp David and they practice this flight multiple times per week. It makes sense because they need a full roster of people so they can provide minimum 2-deep 24 hour coverage and the folks need to be able to do it in their sleep in any weather conditions.
It's still jarring to hear a trio of Blackhawks fly past me at a relatively low altitude.
Talking about a sony headphones above 300 eur though... but as someone healing trauma, it’s a life changer. Its not just less nouse, it gives you a bubble, an island of safety. You can get an hour of quiet before bed...
Agree. Living in an appartment with inconsiderate neighbors, my Sony noise cancelling headphones are a lifesaver. (the bluetooth sucks btw, I mostly use them via minijack).
While I am excited for EVs to become more mainstream, I'm afraid for roads such as mine where the speed limit is 40 and people often drive 50+ that the quiet engine won't make much of a difference given the speed and that the sound of tires on the road and wind rushing around the vehicle are still somewhat loud in their own right. It makes me want to move to a more rural environment where the loudest noise is the refrigerator.
I've been sitting on for a while and given my lack of engineering experience will probably never work on.
Problem:
Unnecessary/excessive noise from outdated/not properly maintained or purposefully broken devices (e.g. combustion engine powered leaf blowers, excessive and outdated reverse gear warning sounds on large vehicles, hollow motorbike ~mufflers~, garbage bins with metal wheels/lids)
Solution:
Create noise pollution maps, showing the areas with most frequent/most excessive noise pollution.
Noise data will exercise economical and political pressure putting an actual market price on the noise levels and requiring the governments to enforce noise limits on vehicles and other registered devices.
Approach 1:
Mobile apps capturing and mapping noise levels in a privacy friendly way, while providing useful diagnostics and recommendations for the users.
Approach 2:
Low power GPS-enabled devices distributed across the city contributing real-time noise data to a central database system for evaluation.
My neighbor has a unique obsession with his leaf-blower. It's like his daily 30-120 minutes of exercise at random times of the day. Even with all the noise-cancelling technology in the world, it ruins me for at least 2-3 hours and makes both video-conferencing and deep work basically impossible.
Here's the thing: Nobody cares. The neighbor can say no to polite requests to figure out a compromise, and your local officials will tell you that you have the right to make as much noise as you want, and nobody else can do anything about it.
Noise ordinances restrict decibels, not the tones or revving patterns or high-pitch "safety" beeping or other things that cut right through the heart despite them not technically being over a decibel level for a sustained period of time.
With more people doing deeper work from home, I hope there are some pioneering cities that can establish protocols that protect work environments and locals' sanity - while still allowing noisy work to get done at predictable times of the day and with reasonable limits on meaningful impact to those living within earshot.
Like TFA, we have to paint noise more like the health problem it actually is.
This drives me insane. I know some shithead lawyer or safety “activist” somewhere is responsible for all the bullshit beeping I have to deal with in my life. A fire alarm going off for no reason. (I would accept the negligible marginal risk of burning to death than have to deal with legally mandated fire alarms.) My car beeping because I didn’t put the seatbelt over the luggage in the passenger seat. Even airplanes aren’t as annoying with the audible alerts as cars. The only time I get beeped at when I’m flying is if I’m stalling or something. At least in aircraft, designers have the understanding and latitude to treat noises as the pointless distractions they are.
> "I know some shithead lawyer or safety “activist” somewhere is responsible for all the bullshit beeping I have to deal with in my life."
Probably not; whoever set the Unix/Linux CLI to ding aggressively whenever you do literally anything is guilty of something or other. It's not just the nature of the beep sound, 8-bit music can be fun, it's combined with the nature of "safety" beeping being an audio wrap-on-the-knuckles for doing something "wrong" like ... pressing backspace when there's nothing to backspace DING! or turning on the induction hob DING! or turning up the power on the induction hob DING! or not hurrying quickly enough to the finished microwave DING DING! or reversing a large vehicle BEEEEEEP! or not plugging in your seatbelt NAUGHTY! (Not being awake for capitalism productivity time RING RING!)
They're not just audio noises, they're psychological soup nazis. Cracking twigs and sudden barks are sounds that somehting is coming to eat you, screeching is a sound that your infant might be about to die, none of it is relevant to trying to adjust a volume control one percent higher than it can go. DING!
I've run Windows with all sounds off, and Linuxes with muted error bels for so long that I can't imagine what it would be like if the entire computing audioscape was nice, encouraging, pleasant, positive feedback like message notifications on smartphones tend to be.
I thought this was obnoxious, until one of my neighbors decided to do the work themselves. It took them an entire long weekend of (what seemed like) 9-5 blowing to clear their lot.
At the same time, there are really good reasons to make noise sometimes, from music to machines, so better ways to do that without overly bothering others are needed too.
But: These are the kinds of "nobody cares it's your fault it bugs you and you need to find a solution" comments that are pervasive. Sure, I need to do my part as someone who's bothered by the sound, but there is no real incentive for the producer of the noise to cut it out.
Not singling you out in particular, just showing that even honest proposals for solutions tend to miss the elephant in the room: noise pollution that isn't pure sustained decibels can still be damaging.
Say I have an obnoxious horn that is a few db below the ordinance/limit. Many may claim that's a nuisance although somehow the blower isn't. But why shouldn't I get to play with my horn for a few hours every day? Maybe my leaves don't like it. The fact that the leaf-blower sound comes from doing a "chore" seems to change the equation in ways that are hard to articulate.
If I came across that way it wasn't intentional. I actually really, really hate unwelcome sound/noise, but I'm also a night owl so I can't really enjoy many of the things I want to enjoy because it would bother others.
Realistically we all make noise in ways we might not initially realize, so on top of singling out and improving the outliers like car horns and yard equipment, we also have to consider ways to let us all go about our business more quietly, and to find solace from noise.
This becomes much more obvious if you have travelled around to other countries, and it's not all about wealth. Yes, rich ones such as Switzerland are a great example because of the heat containment requirements they have, there are poorer countries that still know how to build a house without sound going through it as if it was nothing.
This doesn't mean noise pollution shouldn't be tackled itself, but cities are noisey, and people at least deserve to have domiciles that give them a refuge.
This means you need to start participating in your city and county governments if you really want change (like many things!)
we really need to find an alternative. is it possible to make an electric leaf blower that is both powerful and quiet?
or forget the leaf blower altogether and pay kids to rake up leaves instead. make it the new paper route. $N per bag.
Especially if you pay some kids to do it? They get exercise and money out of it. We get some peace and quiet.
The difference is acknowledging and caring about the externalities paid by anyone in earshot. Sure, do your noisy cathartic thing occasionally when you really need it, but find a better hobby to do every day of the week.
The general advice always seems to be to talk to your neighbour about the problem but, in my experience, this never works and is more likely to aggravate an already testy relationship.
Thus far, until 'being annoying' becomes an acceptable defence for murder, the only strategy that works 100% is to move.
There's little we can do when someone gets pleasure out of running a loud motor for hours at a time. He started a leaf blower, then left it running next to our window while he went inside for about 10 minutes (bathroom visit probably?). Just... insanity.
The electric ones aren't noiseless, but they are a far sight better.
Not sure if it's cultural, due to individual environmental conditions growing up, or biological. I'm starting to wonder if it's biological because I'm also a light sleeper.
I would think that constant white noise would have a positive, or at least no negative impact but I have no evidence, and googling only pulls up intermittent noise studies.
I wonder if the quality of noise has any bearing. For example, if you listen to pleasant music all day at work in an open plan office, does it have the same negative health effects as if it was road noise?
Do the deaf suffer the same effects of being exposed to noise? As in, is it a physiological effect of being near something loud or does your brain have to process the sound?
I've lived close to a loud 4 lane road for 4 years. My windows were bad too. When trucks drove over a bump in the road, I sometimes was able to notice the vibrations.
Given this radical experience and all the pain caused by sleep-deprevation and having to move away finally, I second the article's message whole-heartedly (lol).
Though I was luckily to be able to move, I've stayed sensitive to noise. It's a major stressor in my life and I take it seriously.
In fact, I think that particularly in cities, the German aurhorities should implement tighter rules when it comes to noise pollution, e.g.:
- tone down ambulance's horns or fund technical approaches that work without the high pitch sound
- stop building airports near neighborhoods and restrict air traffic heavily
- enforce stricter rules when honking for stupid reasons
- have cars comply to noise maximums
I have never been more stress free because the kind of people who live here aren't the kind of people who care what I do. Sure it would be great if I lived on a bunch of acres in the country but putting up with some noise is a pretty good middle ground.
I don't have any scientific basis for it, but I suspect birdsong is important somehow. Almost like it's a kind of nutrient.
Also I'm looking for noise cancellation algorithms which can add noise cancellation to any generic TWS earphones by processing through smartphone[1]. Google has added audio amplification for any TWS earphones through android as an accessibility feature, but not the noise cancellation; Is it because the latency matters for the latter more?
[1]I've added the link to it on my profile.
I wonder if New Yorkers realise how absolutely crazy that is.
The worst to me is that people have internalised this so far that they don't see any problem in contributing to this pollution themselves. Just a few weeks ago, someone on my block wanted to move their car at 4 am on like a Wednesday for whatever reason. Unfortunately for this person, someone else had double parked next to their car overnight (a chronically common issue in Brooklyn where I live for some reason). This neighbour somehow thought it would be perfectly reasonable to start honking constantly to alert the person who should move their car to let them out. At 4 am. When they would obviously be waking up many other people nearby that had nothing to do with the issue. In my 10 years here, that level of inconsideration was still pretty shocking to me.
Of course all the people stuck trying to drive down the street started honking and yelling. She got back to the car, yelled back at them and drove off.
I wouldn't consider doing something like that in a million years, but for native New Yorkers, it's par for the course.
That's one reason why I have no hope for self-organizing models of society. There are griefers who only respond to force, and it doesn't take many of them to fuck up the whole game.
The personal satisfaction from having a loud muffler is actually less important than my ability to sleep at night.
In my understanding abandoning self organizing societies that could have more or less noise friendly communities in favor of top down politics that more closely resemble a centrally planned society/dictatorship.
Maybe a phone app with a decibel-meter and a distance metric to each other such app within hearing distance, with pre-authorized amounts to transfer for each decibel level created/experienced?
Rough sketch of a potential process: Harley Q. is riding through the hills with the throttle open when her phone buzzes, indicating she's approaching an area with residents willing to pay above her threshold for <80db experienced noise. She rolls off the throttle and coasts through the upcoming neighborhood, or takes the long way around. Maybe a small extra payment would be put in escrow if she doesn't approach that area while making noise for a few more weeks.
Please note that the apparent bias toward paying the noisemaker is an artifact of existing noise ordinances. Coase can only help us from where we currently are, not from an imaginary utopia.
If we place this in a hypothetical city with a 40db noise restriction, which allows neighborhoods to accept louder noises by consensus, the payments reverse; Ms. Q will try to select the cheapest neighborhood she can enjoy her noise through, and its residents will end up collectively richer in exchange for suffering through the noise.
It's not at all like that, because punching people is currently illegal, and making noise up to a certain threshold is legal. I like peace and quiet more than I like making noise, so I wouldn't mind a lower legal threshold; but the advantage of paying people instead of fighting to change laws is that there's no actual fight.
The advantage of casting things as a moral struggle instead of a difference in preferences is, of course, that you might be able to gather enough allies to defeat the other side and take their stuff.
If you do have the ability to reliably get laws changed at some expense, you should bring that up while bargaining; it will give you a stronger position. You should be able to get a deal that's better than actually spending whatever resource it would take to change the law.
This is an interesting perspective. Can I ask what your background is that exposed you to this way of thinking?
Unless you have a government under your thumb, you'll never compel a population to install this app and all use it. Even if you did manage to convince people to use it, participants will game it into submission before it ever gained relevancy.
Everyone who uses the app gets something they individually want. Noisemakers get the opportunity to be paid to be quiet, and quiet-likers get the opportunity to enjoy peace and quiet for a bit of money.
There's no coercion necessary, although it does rely a bit on geographically local network effects to be useful at all.
And the "Didn't-Think-This-Through-Did-You" Department asks if one really thinks the Loud Pipes Save Lives and Freeduhm! crowd is going to use a location-tracking app? If the answer is yes, boy, has the head of that department got some bad news for you.
That is already a thing: https://tiremeetsroad.com/2019/01/07/how-much-are-tickets-fo..., It's just a bit underenforced.
I could see the Harley crowd being reluctant to install such an app, but I could also see it going the other way with the right marketing. After all, your phone already tracks your location and reports it to any company willing to pay. And what if, instead of just cash, the app gave discount points for a local leather chaps store?
Sounds are pressure waves that transmit through the air.
Given enough pressure, those waves could even kill someone (bomb).
If we say that there should be no legal limit to sound pressure, then making a bomb explode and killing people should have no legal consequences.
This makes no sense, so we should put a threshold of maximum allowed sound pressure. The discussion now is where is that threshold.
You can place the regulation directly on what you want, not just upstream.
In your case, murder is illegal, but the instrument could be completely legal. For example, water is perfectly legal, although one could force someone to ingest too much water and killing them. It would still be illegal, even though water is legal.
We should still regulate sound levels, mind you.
Or bring a bluetooth boombox into the wilderness and play it so it can be heard for a mile away.
Of course there are other issues with that lifestyle which is why it's not adopted widely, like no work, issues for children, issues with healthcare, but for some people it could work, IMO.
There's the rub, no? You need to have a lot of money saved up to not have to work which makes it a luxury. For most people, they need to live near work, which is mostly in or near dense noisy cities.
[0] This doesn't even have to be very far away, and noise can be substantially reduced with a fairly small group of trees between you and the noise source.
Then I see the downvotes on my earlier comment and wonder just what image people have of rural living. Last year I didn't get a wink of sleep on an overnight camp because bullfrogs went hard out the entire night.
Also I'm not sure how this became a binary comparison of the densest urban environments or the sparsest rural retreats. The suburbs exist and that's actually where most people live.
You'll have a hard life ahead of you, though.
It absolutely is. I got the chance to live in a quiet neighborhood near the ocean for a few months and I think back fondly to the level of calm during evening walks there. It felt downright _nourishing_ to my psyche.
This is contrast to living within line of sight to San Diego Airport with the first airplane taking off at 6:31a. In addition to waking me up it would also trigger a significant amount of stress - not a great way to start the day.
Cities are not designed for anything resembling healthy living currently. I hope this changes soon.
From the wikipedia article:
> SAN is in a populated area. To appease the concerns of the airport's neighbors regarding noise and possible ensuing lawsuits, a curfew was put in place in 1979. Takeoffs are allowed between 6:30 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. Outside those hours, they are subject to a large fine. Arrivals are permitted 24 hours per day.[47] While several flights have scheduled departure times before 6:30 a.m., these times are pushback times; the first takeoff roll is at 6:30 a.m.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_International_Airpor...
High RPM street bikes which get “gunned” by their riders are also very loud and more frequent than passé choppers.
Seriously, go electric and ban those abominations.
Dirt bikes are around 100 decibels, perform like trash and shouldn't be on the freeway near cars in the first place.
Here in Puerto Rico we have herds (20-200) of two stroke bikes that ride together at night for fun. I would gladly trade them for 1000 Harley-Davidsons.
If you want to do something that’s too dangerous to do without infuriating everyone around you, maybe you just shouldn’t do it.
I don’t think those super loud exhausts are stock either. There are tons of bikers who replace the stock pipes with the loudest ones they can find. I don’t get it at all.
As a side note, this line of thinking "[it infuriates others so] maybe you shouldn't do it" leans totalitarian which in turn leads to suboptimal outcomes (since no one person or even organization knows the optimal way of living or organizing society -- e.g. no mortals can play "god" so to speak). Also, many people are "infuriated" by trivial things, so it's not always a good way to live life imagining who these ambiguous others are and also to placate to their imagined sensibilities.
I think that an important part of being a decent human being living in close proximity to other human beings is recognizing and limiting one's own anti-social behavior. I hope that's not a controversial statement.
Citation needed. I'd be willing to bet money that a honda civic has fewer emissions than a harley.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Do-loud-pipes-really-significantly-sav...
Motorcycle people generally spend money to placard their cars up with "Watch out for motorcyclists!" stickers so unless you're insinuating the government should use public funds to educate drivers on checking their mirrors and not getting into accidents with motorcyclists I'm not sure what you're actually saying.
In both the UK and US, advanced training courses are available and are recognized my insurance companies who offer discounts.
Anecdotally, the people that I've picked up off the highway have all been on a cruiser-style bike, been wearing improper clothing (usually shorts and T-Shirts) and not been wearing a helmet. Now that's legal here in CO and fine for an individual to make their own decisions. With further training however, you can make better decisions particularly around risk assessment and handling characteristics.
[edit - typo]
For the folks who are riding around on $20-40k worth of bike with illegal and noisy aftermarket pipes - that they paid for - it's not really an excuse.
It’s not a silver bullet but it’s one more layer of safety and I don’t understand why that statement is so controversial? I’m not even advocating for these after-market mods (I don’t use one) just pointing out that there is in fact a tradeoff.
Now, some riders just like being loud for the sake of it, and that is a whole different story.
As a member of a motorcycle riding family in the US (I don't ride, but several close family members do) this is hilariously wrong. They like it loud because they like the sound, and they like to get noticed. I say hilariously because I constantly joke with my family members about how silly the bike culture is, and to give full credit to them; they agree.
This is a euphemism for "take pleasure in causing physical discomfort to everyone within earshot".
Whenever I am stuck in stop and go traffic, I can hear/feel lane splitting harleys coming from way behind. Sportbikes just whiz by, making you jump, especially if you were thinking of changing lanes.
I don't believe 'loud pipes save lives' is completely bogus.
I'm definitely not arguing that 2-stroke is quieter though. Just that it's not quite an apples to apples comparison due to both variables having an impact.
There was a constant stream of noise, but with the cars it wasn't a big problem, because it was the same volume all the time, so I quickly got used to it. Motorcycles though were a huge issue! Every 10-15 minutes there was some motorcycle passing that just distracted me from whatever I was doing. I left that apartment as soon as I could.
https://www.alpinehearingprotection.com/earplugs/motosafe-pr...
Stressing about that kind of stuff that you ultimately have little/no control over is an express train to an unhappy life.
There's some evidence to suggest magnesium deficiency can lead to an increase in startle response.
You can't be serious when you say that you'd lock someone in a cage for the rest of their life because they broke a noise ordinance.
There could be a restriction on the vehicle. Some European cities have zones with restricted access to vehicles based on their CO2 emissions. There are stickers that you have to put on your windshield to drive into those areas.
We could have some "noise emission" regulations that ban some vehicles from driving at certain times, like before 9am or after 7pm.
It would be similar to the CO2 emission regulations, there's no need to measure the emissions because you have a sticker that already say what your emission levels are.
We could make re-registering more difficult or impossible for people with addresses in areas with those kind of ordinances
Enthusiasts will have nominal addresses but it can be a deterrent