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.
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...
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.
[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.
You'll have a hard life ahead of you, though.
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.
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.
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.
You can place the regulation directly on what you want, not just upstream.
High RPM street bikes which get “gunned” by their riders are also very loud and more frequent than passé choppers.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
Seriously, go electric and ban those abominations.
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
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.