Semi-joke: Anyone can do it, just drill holes to exhaust before muffler. I thought that maybe I should do that, like annoy so much people that something would be done in regarding this.
Not many people realize that leaf blowers remove a ton of top soil from grass and tree roots. It does a ton of damage to so many plants. All those exposed roots we often see should not be exposed that way.
The commercial lawn and tree trimming in Southern California is almost criminal what they do in the name of “landscape maintenance”.
The yard guys our landlord hired proceeded to blow all the topsoil off the yard that summer, and even when I tried to re-seed the lawn, it was impossible because they'd just come by every week and blow everything around. One time we were cooling off a birthday cake outside when the yard guys came and it almost got covered with dust when they arrived unannounced on a day they didn't normally come.
Leaf blowers are awful, noisy, and mostly don't do anything useful - unless you're ACTUALLY moving around fallen leaves.
I prefer the 1 minute of leaf blower versus the 30+ minutes of hearing a rake. Rakes are pretty loud too.
Anyone in a position to do so should require in their lawn care contract that only electric leaf blowers or none at all must be used.
Speed bumps and stops signs annoy me too. Get rid of those, reduce the unnecessary acceleration/braking, and such cars should sail by quietly.
I wouldn't say stop signs are bad, they're put there for a reason. Speed bumps however force you to slow down way below the allowed speed, then while you're on the pedal you might just accelerat back to whatever speed.
The actibump in Linköping, Sweden solves this by only being in the way if you drive too fast. Used to live next to one of these, worked like a charm.
Roundabouts (or 'rotaries', depending on where you live) and yield signs could do a whole lot to reduce travel times and increase efficiency by a surprisingly large amount.
The problems are numerous, but mostly the urban areas weren't designed for such, the costs to switch would be large, and the American driver can take up to six years to adjust to a new traffic pattern.
Due to the rural/exurban character of the area, space for roundabouts isn't much of an issue. I suspect lots of other similar counties could do the same with similar results but it takes someone in the planning office to take the chance on doing it. Also it takes money so from a fiscal point of view, it's best to redo intersections when they're already scheduled for being repaved or they're having capacity issues that need to be addressed.
Perhaps ours are a different design?
Which makes them basically useless, and difficult navigate for e.g. vehicles with trailers--you end up running dragging the trailer over the center or something.
It can be depressingly long.
In my car - I have to frequently take them at an angle unless I want to scrape (comes from the factory that way) - even then, it's not bullet proof. Especially in parking lots where there are no rules - I've scrapped the middle section of my car because they built them for lifted vehicles.
If the goal is to reduce speed - it kind of works - but it adds the extra layer of obnoxious noise which basically kills any of the benefits IMO. On top of this - you now have people introducing far more brake dust and tire material into your local environment because everyone has to slow down to cross a speed bump and then accelerate again too. If we had speed bumps on my street - I'd be advocating for them to be removed. They're burdensome on the locals due to the noise pollution they create. You want a loud vehicle to get by as fast as possible and with as little throttle as possible. Nothing worse than hearing it crawl over multiple speed bumps.
Blame truck and SUV drivers. Speed bumps must be designed to slow the largest vehicle down to a safe speed, thus harming lighter and less off-road capable vehicles more.
In my pickup, I have found that it is much smoother to speed up and hit them faster so that the shocks engage and it causes much less of a bump in the cabin than if I slow down.
It was a residential street nowhere close to high traffic, so it basically only punished the residents
How about we instead regulate the noise cars make and not purposefully disable road safety features. That way we can enjoy quiet roads without asking other people to risk their lives for it.
My wife and I are building a home at the moment and, when it came time to consider appliances, noise of a given appliance was a factor and something we took into consideration. For example, we chose a very quiet vent hood to go over the hob/stovetop since it's an open plan kitchen/living area. Vent hoods can be very noisy (65+ dB) when running maximum.
However, given that there are tractors in fields nearby, dogs, chickens, and other "sounds of rural life" ... we made sure to put in a LOT of insulation and also went for triple-paned windows. While the house isn't yet complete, we hear almost no outside sounds when we are inside.
When we compare that to our current location - on a side street, but a moderately busy one - with sometimes couriers on loud motorcycles, lorries, police/fire vehicles (sirens), and the occasional person with a car that has an exhaust tuned to be loud ...the difference is really quite remarkable.
In my younger days, I had a heavily modified car that was no problem to get to pass, despite numerous possible non-compliance items.
I'm familiar with the measuring method for motorcycles, which basically means that a powerful enough motorcycle will be very quiet when tested because it will be running at very low RPMs (the standard is 3rd gear at 50 Km/h – on my bike that's around 1500-2000 RPM out of 10000).
The noise issue is with people flooring it just to stop at the next light 200 m down the road. And also badly tuned exhausts that pop like crazy.
I'm actually wondering if this hasn't become a fashion for some reason, since I hear more and more cars make that noise. And those cars look pretty expensive, so I don't think they have aftermarket exhausts, if only because changing it is a bit more involved than on motorcycles, and pretty much all newish-looking "fast" cars seem to make that noise.
But I agree, in Paris at least, loud motorcycles are more of a nuisance than cars, if only because there's more of them. Cars do tend to get on my nerves on weekends, though.
Some people think it sounds cool.
Some people think it sounds extremely annoying.
Either way it is possible for a lot of these cars to sound quiet during an inspection.
There has been talk about a labelling similar to environmental zones (which means older, dirty exhaust cars can't drive in cities) as well, meaning loud cars would not be allowed in cities.
Edit: oh, and everything louder than 72db, 0.5m from the exhaust at a 45degree offset, is already forbidden for cars iirc.
Where can I learn about this?
Motorcycles in particular have the danger that if a driver in a vehicle doesn't see them, they can get ran over. Being smaller, they have a tendency to easily hide in blind spots or just not be noticed at all because the driver is expecting another large vehicle.
So many motorcycle riders use flashing headlights and loud pipes to announce their presence.
- fab in the bathroom
- fridge sometimes, it’s old
- the washing machine
- heating thing when you use warm water
No fans nothing. Loving my m1
Also, traditionally, in an 'airing cupboard': a space where washed clothes 'air' before being put in drawers. There is a lot of variation.
For fab, Google says:
> British an expression of agreement to, or acknowledgment of, a command
m1 is a carbine, ok no surprise that makes noise, but in the house?
M1 = apple’s new m1 microchip that is the brains of their new machines. It never gets hot since it was designed for phones, so it doesn’t need a fan to cool it like Intel chips.
No fab at home either though