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Comment by scioxo | Hacker News Reader

It pains me that noise pollution isn't taken as seriously as other forms of environmental damage when it's the one that most directly impacts (urban) people's quality of life.

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The cars, trucks and motorcycles with booming exhaust pipes are insufferable. I despise hearing them revving by. I feel like I'm crazy for how much it bothers me. But then I read a story about a man shooting a driver who was just revving up and down his street, so I'm not alone.

I spent a week in Helsinki, and was blown away by how quiet it was despite being far more dense than my city.

"Loud pipes save lives"

ugh

If I was a cop, I would make it my sole mission to ticket each and every one all day long.

It would be especially sweet if it was a motorcycle cop writing those tickets. Though if I were a cop, I wouldn't want to be a motorcycle cop because they have a higher fatality rate.

As a motorcyclist, I'm firmly in the camp about quiet, stock pipes.

If I was dictator, I would impound and destroy any vehicle that was too loud.

Also any that have too bright headlights. Crush directly into a cube. And then fine the owner if he doesn't move his cube.

Brightness isn’t necessarily the problem if they are pointed at the correct angle. Lights within spec are annoyingly blinding if set too high.

This is a perfect example of why cops should be paid more. If you could be convinced to be a cop the world would be a better place.

This is the exact attitude that should be tested for and taken as "going to be a bad cop".

My late grandfather was a psychiatric expert doing psych evaluation of candidates for armed forces. His method was largely just chatting with the person for a few minutes and asking general questions. Even that revealed a lot. He didn't tell a lot about the people specifically, he took confidentiality very seriously, but could tell there where a lot of freaks applying, a notable candidate with a straight up American history X nazi tattoo.

I dont get why police dont take quality of life crimes more seriously like that. Like if you have a noise problem there is no reason to call the police, they won't show up. What are we paying them for? To write up documents for crimes that happen after the fact?

It's because the police serve the interests of the owning class, and so prioritize things such as corporate property damage and the ability for workers to get to their jobs.

Note that loud exhaust is not an issue in more affluent neighborhoods...

I've been told the number of people driving with loud exhaust is a function of how close you are to the nearest meth house. This is after adjusting the data for level of travel a given road or nearby road

Wow. Cool. Do you have any data on that?

I live near a school (equivalent to middle as well as high school). The rest is a purely residential area.

I feel that living near a school in the morning with mommy driving little Kevin to school in big SUV and little Kevin's older brother revving his engine as much as he can with his car comes probably somewhat close.

Yeah, especially at 11:30 at night as they loudly rev their bikes with a grin at. every. damned. stop. sign.

Really, do they have to? They can't just give it a little throttle to get it moving, they have to open it all the way unsettling the whole neighborhood with the exhaust noise when it's otherwise quiet and there are few cars?

They kinda do. About 30% of people only feel they're winning when they see someone else worse off (even at cost to themselves), so the knowledge that they're annoying people actively gives them life.

I roll my window up if I'm near motorcycles. There's been too many times when my ear got blasted all of a sudden.

Worse is booming bass. Not while driving, but at home from the neighbors. Hours on end... boom... boom...

Yup, that's why I'm building a house as far away from others as physically possible.

I looked into this claim a while ago, and actual research on the subject is equivocal at best. Most often, drivers don't even notice the sound on an already-noisy road or highway, through deliberately sound-dampening windows, over music and conversation, etc. Even if they notice, they don't necessarily know where it's coming from. Even if they know where it's coming from, it doesn't necessarily influence their actions. Some people who say "loud pipes save lives" are just fooling themselves. More often, people who say it know it's not likely to be true, but they say it anyway to put a veneer of respectability over the fact that they like the sound and don't care if it's annoying to others.

I had to move because of the motorcycles. I literally couldn’t take it anymore. Too many nights being woken up at 2am. Those people don’t care about anyone but themselves.

Same here. We lived in a grid system suburb where the roads next to us were used all hours of the day by cars. There was a constant stream of illegally modified trucks screaming past us and waking us up all hours of the night.

I so relate. I was once able to test drive a Audi R8 Spyder because the agency I work for works for Audi.

The motor sound isn't anything near quiet. Far from it. But I was astounded to find a button that enables a loud motor sound function.

With this button pressed the sound makes a lot of bikes sound like child toys. I really don't understand how one needs to show off in such a fashion and explicitly expressing a loud (pun intended) f** you to the rest of the world.

Insecurity, lack of self-awareness, lack of support

Victims of Stockholm syndrome. They were conditioned to associate the pleasure of effortless movement - such as you get silently on a sailboat or downhill skiing or biking - with the noise of internal combustion contraptions.

Good thing the end of those is in sight.

You are not alone at all, some of us just accept that shooting people is illegal, even if they deserve to be shot, and just continue to suffer in silence.

NotJustBikes does a great video on this https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8

Cities aren't Loud, Cars are Loud.

Most "cities" in North America, to use the term generously, are miserable car sewers where you need to shout to have a conversation outside.

Ugh, there is one dude in my town with this beat up old Civic with what sounds like a literal tin can for an exhaust, and the engine is tuned so badly that it backfires every time he shifts, which he does at the bend by my house. Which of course sets the dogs barking.

All I'm saying is, I kinda commiserate with the guy in that story.

Europe in general seems to have far less of that particular kind of jackassery. Better enforcement? Or are people just more considerate?

The average person just doesn't seem to care. I've observed first hand people feeling unbelievably entitled to force their noise onto others. This includes blasting music on portable speakers while in remote wilderness areas, stomping around in boots while living in a multi-floor apartment, and modified exhaust and emission systems, just to name a few. It's reflective of a pretty sad state of affairs in our culture, the selfish state of which has surfaced in many other ways lately. It frequently gives me Dr. Farnsworth moments [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j1xzezy8k4

It drives me crazy. I really don't know how other people deal with it. Like my neighbors are so unbelievably loud, its starting to get to me. (I think some cultures identify with being loud?) Or do people just accept a poorer quality of life.

Its pretty much the only reason why I think dense living is a bad idea. People are are to inconsiderate of each other to make it work I think and construction quality is too low. I hate being subjected to other people's noise. I'm a light slight sleeper so it wakes me up or it makes it hard to concentrate or even just relax. I don't want to live on some strangers schedule.

I can go on forever with a huge rant about how terrible noise is. I hate dealing with it. Talking to every person who is just way to loud is like whack a mole with noise.

75% of the reason I live in the country is because of the reasons you listed, as is 100% of the reason I'd never live anyplace other than a single family home.

I don't really get it though, like you want it to be quiet everywhere always? I definitely hate motorcycles or loud cars, but I've never been bothered too much by people noises or music. I've lived in highrises and above a night club and it was ok.

Construction can be annoying and I once lived next door to a tire shop and that was pretty bad, but even things like fireworks don't bother me.

I've lived in nature and on a farm before as well and both are pretty loud. Animals are loud and on the farm chickens, cows and geese can rival and humans noise or music. In nature bird noises are pretty crazy too and the coyotes will wake the dead from about 2-5am.

Silence is too weird, not all sounds are the same. Like chickens are horrible though and not really a natural part of most environments. I don't want to live on a farm. I didnt think cows were to bad when I stayed next to a small farm.

Some how I can deal with fireworks too though i would be pretty irritated if it happened every night and woke me up or something. Loud music drives me crazy, especially if its not music I enjoy. Bass particularly is bad, i struggle to drown it out with noise. I had a neighbor who I guess wanted to dj, the kick drum would go straight through the wall for hours. Cars that drive by with loud music or idle out side my window i found irritating.

Speaker phone conversations bother me, not sure why, i can usually tune out most regular conversations (except when its not in english?), but they also wake me up. Hearing muffled conversation through a wall is distracting. Loud tvs suck. Children screaming is terrible, babies crying etc.. My downstairs neighbor wakes me up when they start yelling at each other at 7am. Closing doors or cabinets or walking is mostly fine for me.

I guess no unnecessary or sudden, loud, repeated noise would be great. Like a car alarm or a child screaming for no reason. I'm not totally sure what the pattern is or what a tolerable noise is or bad noise is. Crickets are nice, i had no problem when i lived next to a lake with frogs or in pr with coqui frogs. Construction is bad.

Bass can wiggle through walls in ways that surprise even the person generating it. Worse, the wall filters out much of the other frequencies that might make it bearable. I think most people with their music rattling through their car doors don't even realize it. Think about it: the only way they would know is if they left the music on, got out, and shut the door. Not a common occurrence.

Plenty of music people think to treat their rooms with the usual foam on the walls, but not everyone thinks (or cares) to treat it with bass traps.

The incessant mooing.

> Its pretty much the only reason why I think dense living is a bad idea

You can have quiet and soundproofed dense living. It just takes some standards and codes to take it into account.

NotJustBikes recently made a video about how some Dutch cities are taking this very seriously ( like Delft), and how it works ( Cities aren't loud, cars are is the video name). In France good soundproofing is mandatory on new constructions, etc. People and regulators just need to care :)

they won't care, quality of life issues don't matter in the US. Someone will just call you a "karen" or something.

Im skeptical of sound proofing actually working. I think to actually sound proof you need an airgap between walls? This is all really expensive too

But that only stops some sound. If its warm and you need to open your windows all of that effort doesnt matter. Your just stuck hoping you don't have loud neighbors. Right now my neighbor is practicing their saxophone, its loud and grating (and not well played) everyone's windows are open the weather is mild so im stuck listening to it

It baffles me as well. It’s exceedingly obvious (to me) how significant an effect it has on wellbeing, yet it seems virtually ignored, particularly in the US. I’ve found that it’s somewhat better in the UK (London), but there’s still a ways to go.

It’s a classic example of a commons. It’s something that benefits everyone, yet is SO easy to wreck for everyone for miles in every direction. There’s a classic article “Silence is a Commons” that has been posted here before; it’s not so much focused on health/wellbeing but makes a similar point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28431541

Yet if the beat of a metronome will depress intelligence, what do eight or twelve hours of noise, odor, and heat in a factory, or day upon day among chattering typewriters and telephone bells and slamming doors, do to the political judgments formed on the basis of newspapers read in street-cars and subways? Can anything be heard in the hubbub that does not shriek, or be seen in the general glare that does not flash like an electric sign? The life of the city dweller lacks solitude, silence, ease. The nights are noisy and ablaze. The people of a big city are assaulted by incessant sound, now violent and jagged, now falling into unfinished rhythms, but endless and remorseless. Under modern industrialism thought goes on in a bath of noise. If its discriminations are often flat and foolish, here at least is some small part of the reason. The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult. “The intolerable burden of thought” is a burden when the conditions make it burdensome. It is no burden when the conditions are favorable. It is as exhilarating to think as it is to dance, and just as natural.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions."

- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922

Yeah. Some places do take it seriously; this video provides some nice context: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8

...my city is unfortunately not one of them.

It'll be interesting to see how electrification of transport changes this. Here in Europe we're phasing out ICE at quite a rate and the proposed euro 7 standards are so strict that it will also alter what the car fleet looks like.

We live on a main road (although it's all relative, it's single lane in both directions and limited to 30mph) and i've already started noticing that the majority of what I hear is now tyre noise.

> the proposed euro 7 standards are so strict that it will also alter what the car fleet looks like.

What do you mean by this? Got any links handy?

I believe it's a proposal at the moment, not totally sure the timeline:

https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/eu-commission-euro-7...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards

And there's been plenty in the automotive press saying how it will negatively affect the car manufacturers, e.g:

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry-news-tech%2C-dev...

> (urban) people's quality of life

Not really. There do exist very noisy countrysides, mountainous areas etc. (Still often because of infrastructure or uncaring dwellers.)

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