New York is using cameras with microphones to ticket loud cars
roadandtrack.com
roadandtrack.com
Police enforcement could probably solve the issue just as effectively. Cops ignore loud honking and loud cars when its right in front of them. If they would just stop ignoring such things the frequency would surely go down as well.
Lest people think I'm a motorcycle hater: I owned one for years. I had a stock and quiet muffler on it, though.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43154773
> "What we managed to show is the combination of the crosswind and the temperature gradient can cause sound that's going to go vertically (to) get refracted back down," he said. "The sound was literally bent back downwards."
> The effect often happens at dawn and dusk because sound bends from hotter air into cooler air. During the day, the ground is hotter than the air above it so sound bends vertically upward.
> "Its only when the sun stops falling on the ground that the ground cools down. Then the air gets hotter above," he said. "That's when sound can bend towards the ground and become trapped."
We don't need the windows open to hear the cars and such around here (and they're modern windows). We're near a freeway, but it's not the only culprit. The freeway is either silent or quite noisy depending on ambient weather conditions.
But when the cars open up, it sounds like a racetrack. We can hear them accelerating up the on ramp, up shifting as they go, and even when they hit the flyover to the other freeway.
The ratio of motorcycles to cars is actually quite low. Most of the offenders are the V8 pony cars.
I, too, am not a motorcycle hater. While I don't own one, I'm licensed to operate one, and have several friends who are avid riders. They have stock, quiet exhaust on their bikes, like normal people who actually care about people around them.
By and large, highway traffic is a low, background static, somewhat like the ebb and flow of a more mechanical wind.
But, because our sidestreet skips a single traffic light on a parallel street, mororbikes live roaring through it, easily louder that anything from the literal highway. At this point, I'd support a ban on motorbikes over 80db.
Almost.
Not a fan of camera surveillance for such infractions though.
This comes to mind for this thread.
I just drove to San Diego and back from the Bay Area and counted zero cops on the way down and two on the way back, and I returned on Super Bowl eve. In the south Bay Area, I regularly see folks intentionally disregard basic traffic safety laws. I never see anyone pulled over and generally never see any cops.
My niece works in public safety in WA state and says that morale is in the gutter as police have been told to back off in all but the most imminent situations. The example she gave is that police now cannot intervene if they see an armed individual approaching a school. That sounds unbelievable but that's straight from the mouth of the local chief of police.
I'm not typically pro-law enforcement but I am definitely not pro-no-law enforcement.
On an unrelated note, I'm now about to get front window tinting on my vehicles because, why not, it's not like any traffic or vehicle laws are being enforced now.
It's hilarious. Our biggest traffic offenders are the cops themselves. They speed, run reds on a whim, park in the middle of sidewalks, it's totally cool and we love it. It’s so great that there's a twitter account (@placardabuse) that tracks public officials who flout the law and has no shortage of content.
As for enforcement: they don't. The explanation I've heard is, "We don't like being the bad guy." They join the force to become CSI detectives or terrarism-fighting SWAT soldiers, not to be that shithead who ruined your commute home.
I'm definitely sure that our new police-chief-mayor — who just cancelled a widely-loved car-free-street program in Clinton Hill because one of his cronies thought it was annoying — will be right on top of things.
[edit] Oh, and regarding these noise cameras… the very vocal minority of New Yorkers who have cars fight tooth and nail against camera speeding enforcement. The rest of us don't speak up because we don't have cars so we don't feel as affected. Also we don't even have control over our own laws, that’s all in the hands of the state gov't. So I have little faith that this will plan will survive, but hey, fingers crossed X,,
https://twitter.com/_elkue/status/1494021798924623872?s=21 https://twitter.com/nycbikelanes/status/1494022728185270277?...
It’s not true but it makes more sense if they’re saying that as a negotiating tactic: the police are banking that if the media coverage is dominated by stories about crime rising there will be a big reduction in support for police accountability.
While I place a lot of the blame at the feet of the police for failing to enforce law, I also understand that at least in my city, even repeat offenders are being released back into the wild with no skin in the game - a "personal recognizance" bond.
I'm a left of center kind of guy, but this idea that we can totally kid-glove criminals (especially repeat ones) with peace and love and respect and whatever new-agey shenanigans that's helped us get to where our social order is falling apart doesn't fly with me.
I have noticed this too, and am curious if it is:
- DMVs being slow/understaffed or plates aren't available, but people need to drive
- conscious negligence of simply not registering your car and betting it won't be enforced
More broadly, I think it makes sense to automate some law enforcement activities by using speed cameras, etc. Cameras remove problems with bias and escalation. They also free up LEOs to focus on activities that can't be automated.
The alternative is hire more officers and pay them more. That's not something that voters appear willing to do, even in the affluent Bay Area. (...or to do anything about homelessness in the South Bay; apparently we have collectively decided that the answer is to just ignore the problem and look the other way as people slowly die on the street)
A licensed gun owner can have a gun near a school in Washington, so why would you expect police to be able to intervene when someone is merely approaching a school?
Police could ask the person what they are doing, but unless they have probable cause that the person is committing a crime they can't arrest them.
Having said that, they don't have the best rep for enforcing traffic violations here.
When I drove from Melbourne to Brisbane and back, a 3,500 km round trip on mostly dual carriageway freeways, I didn't see a single cop outside of built up areas.
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/usdot-releases-...
Are you aware of any changes in (local) government policies in these affected areas? My cynical take is that this is an intentional play by police to allow things to deteriorate so that the public begs for the police to step up and rollback the loss of support since the high profile police-instigated incidents that culminated in George Floyd's killing. I don't think it's going to shake out that way, at least not as quickly as they'd hope.
It allows for discretionary law enforcement. Cops love it.
They can ignore it you if they like you, or fine you if they don't.
Why not have the automated system issue a warning instead of a citation for the first offense?
[1] Check out this Twitter account, which documents NYPD traffic lawbreaking https://twitter.com/placardabuse. It's often really egregious stuff, like parking right in front of a fire hydrant or ticketing every illegally parked car on a street except for one with a police placard.
Or ignore everyone if their approval rating is in the toilet, which is what they're doing as much as they can right now.
HN screeches a lot about it but the meatspace people I talk to don't seem to mind.
Putting aside consideration for others around you, what is even the appeal of hearing damage levels of car noise?
It's legal, why would they turn their heads?
IANAL, but I think it goes waaayy over the line of setting a trap, which is very illegal (even to trap ppl repeatedly doing highly illegal things), and will most definitely get you sued for all you're worth if you manage to cause any injuries, and probably face criminal charges [0][1][2].
Just because you can does not mean that you should... (now having the drone catch up to them and cover them in glitter, maybe)
[0] https://www.sfinelaw.com/blog/2019/october/how-setting-a-boo...
[1] https://definitions.uslegal.com/b/booby-traps/
[2] https://www.halt.org/booby-traps-and-the-law-defend-your-pro...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22cars+will+run+us+over+if+we%27r...
Traffic stops could then be relegated to imminent dangers like drunk or otherwise reckless drivers, and serious crimes.
Jaywalking is a good example, it doesn't get enforced basically ever and when it does it's overwhelmingly poor minorities. So the city has just been adding pedestrian crossings in areas where people where people jaywalk to reduce the incentive.
Living in a city has more noise than outside of cities, but that doesn't mean that people deserve to be exposed to noise levels that are harmful to their health. This also ignores people who are born in the city, and can't leave it for various reasons.
Various laws on noise levels have been laws in NYC for decades at this point because it's a public health and quality of life problem.
Compare to a quiet suburb at 5:30am... dead silence interrupted by the neighbor revving their modified F150 audible a mile in every direction.
The delta is not the same.
Am I wrong about this? I was only in a couple of cities but it was stark how I could always hear sirens
But even granting that sirens are louder, they serve an explicit purpose. Loud cars and motorcycles do not.
This gave me a chuckle. I have absolutely no data but I'm quite certain cars are "used for crimes" at a much higher rate than motorcycles.
Motorcycles are almost all manual, nearly invisible to other drivers, and prone to issues with the smallest of road hazards/obstacles, making them really risky to use as a getaway vehicle seeing as you'd need to be outpacing law enforcement much of the time. Add the adrenaline of "doing a crime" on top of that of high-speed motorcycle riding and you've really got a recipe for disaster in most cases. There was a stolen bike in LA being chased by the cops last month who collided with a car and the rider died. https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2022-01-24/mot...
Maybe being "used for crimes" would be better since you're less likely to actually get away on them!
We have a similar problem. Replace "motorcycle" with "bro-dozer" and make it 4am.
Noise sucks. And since the pandemic lockdowns have lifted, it's even more abrasive. Those few months of relative quiet were marvelous. Where I live, it's a lot of tire noise from a highway over a mile away - just a constant background "brrrrrr" that I didn't notice before and can't ignore today.
Bikers actually say that with a straight face. It drives me bonkers. If I look at any list on the internet about top 10 ways to stay safe on a motorcycle, none of those lists will include "loud pipes". Yet, those same bikers will ignore other items on those safety lists like wearing brightly colored high visibility jacket/vest.
If anything, the black leather jacket is practically a uniform.
> But loud pipes save lives
The argument falls flat on its face when you extrapolate it to any other medium. Cyclists and pedestrians should be going around with boomboxes attaches to their bodies.
I love the sound of a good vehicle. But pump that sound in for the driver, not for the unconsenting bystander.
I think most riders are in this camp as well - they just want their bike to look and sound good (good!=loud necessarily), rather than be obnoxious, but there's a small number of riders that just want volume for the LOOK AT ME factor. I'm 100% against those folk - they're just being selfish and spoiling it for everyone else.
The road is a noisy place. Cars are soundproofed to deal with that. A loud engine antagonizes everyone not driving but drivers won't even hear it.
Literally one person. Always the same car. I am so sick of this shit. Management is sick of it but "can't do anything." I have yet to meet a neighbor who is not aware of this problem and sick of it.
I'm honestly amazed at the audacity of these people.
Gas tank donations are one common approach, as is helping aesthetics by removing those unsightly air valves on tires.
This is fundamentally a conflict of class based social norms. The kind of people who have obnoxiously loud cars don't have a lot of the kind of people who complain about obnoxiously loud cars in their social circles.
Doesn't your building have rules about noise, and (hopefully) fines for non-compliance? That seems pretty standard.
Engine can't make noise if there's a 6" hole going through it.
I definitely want to step on anyone's "freedoms" if those freedoms egregiously infringe on other people's freedoms.
I know your scenario is particularly egregious, but there’s other stories in this thread that make me wonder how someone can live in Manhattan or along an interstate highway and still complain about noise.
For extra fun, automate it to start playing music as early as you can to match their sleep schedule, even when you’re out of the house. Say that it’s to warm up your speakers for when you get home.
Jesus. At that point I'd go up to questionably legal methods to get these fuckers some justice. People who intentionally murder cats deserve everything that's coming for them.
Even if you caught it clearly on camera and can get the cops to give a shit, what's going to happen is probably a fine or probation, and now your demonstrably-shitty neighbors have a serious grudge against you. You've "won, but also lost so badly that you may end up having to move. So your best likely outcome, after much effort and possibly some expense, is a very Pyrrhic victory.
They could be sued civilly, but the damages you'd win are basically the cost of a replacement pet, so super insulting.
I agree in general that approaching your neighbours first is the theoretically right thing to do before escalating. That works out well far far less likely than I'd like it to.
In our neighborhood, there is a family in the same vein whose kid insisted on honking the horn whenever he rounded a corner, no matter what time of day or night. Nice requests via email by the two nearest homeowners did nothing. Showing up at his house after one of the incidents antagonized the father. The only thing that got the kid to stop was exposing him (describing the car, which is unique) on the neighborhood FB group, and the father only reluctantly stopped his son after angrily criticizing the affected family and condemning the issue coming out on Facebook.
I find it hypocritical for someone to drive and complain about noise from a major road.
And it's why people choose not to live near major roads.
I lived on a road with light-medium traffic recently. I couldn't tell you if 10 or 100 passenger cars went by the house.
My blood pressure would shoot up whenever I heard a car with a "Burble Tune" go by: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZugoUx_sgrY
I don't think it phases in fast enough, tbh, but it's a start. Someone the next block over from me runs their leaf blower around 7 AM everyday and it is godawful noise -- the sound carries at least 2 or 3 blocks in every direction
And of course, they'd begin their work promptly at 8 AM, and it always felt like they would spend extra time blowing leaves right outside my window.
But yes, 2-stroke lawn-care engines are egregious offenders in the climate and air quality battles. At least make it all electric like CA's been doing.
This just seems like such an obvious class divide thing to me. Those guys out there with the leaf blowers are working their ass off, sorry it's loud for a few minutes per day.
Ignoring the environmental aspect I think limited use in suburban settings is reasonable. I'm particularly focused on egregious use in urban settings when we aren't talking fall leaf collection but constant "cleaning". Obviously it's not the workers fault... it's a matter of mis-priced negative externalities. Napkin math say the noise makes 100 people WFH 10% less effective for an hour at say $50hr wage average it certainly makes more sense to just pay workers to work twice as long with brooms (if the work is even necessary in the first place).
The vast majority of motorcyles in America are illegally modified to be louder than they should [0]. This crime is basically impossuble to police because you need an offer with a reliable sound meter device in the right place at the right time. I am glad NY is going to automate this.
I used to live on a street (Guerrero St in SF) that had loud motorcycles ripping down in the middle of the night on a daily basis. Every time this happens I am sure multiple people wake up, causing loss of sleep and therefore loss of happiness and productivity. All so some selfish rider can have their loud toy.
0: https://rickeyholtsclaw.com/2016/03/10/the-truth-about-loud-...
I live down the street from a biker club clubhouse. It would be beyond trivial to police this here, but of course the police don't care. Or, worse, probably have some sort of agreement with them. Meanwhile, I get woken up at 3am several times a week by a loud bike that sets off car alarms as it goes by.
"vast majority" just doesn't pass the giggle test.
> Approximately 60-80% of the large displacement motorcycles operating on our public roadways at any given time in the United States have been illegally modified
you’re missing an important qualifier in your own text (“large displacement”). your source also repeatedly says that noise disruption in and of itself is domestic terrorism, which seems… a little ABSURD to me? really? are people TERRIFIED by loud motorcycles? no: it’s a disturbance, an annoyance, a nuisance, many things. but TERRORISM it is not. i really wouldn’t put a whole lot of stock in this source of yours.
But on the other hand, fuck loud cars and motorcycles, they are a menace to society, and they are the only thing that makes my blood boil, when they wake me up at 2am.
Holding the titled owner of a vehicle responsible for excessive noise or pollution, though, makes sense regardless of who's driving. I see no issue here, while I definitely oppose the former.
0. https://time.com/3505994/red-light-camera-problems-tickets/
In my opinion, they should be deemed unconstitutional via a violation of rights against search and seizure, and rights for a proper trial. It's impossible to face your accuser in court, it's impossible to actually check the software used to identify whether you were speeding, and asymmetrically automating enforcement of something where it's in the enforcer's interest to find violations is a perverse incentive we should not allow in our legal system.
In order to have nice things the population really needs to culturally understand that "with great power comes great responsibility".
Instead we have a culture of entirely selfish individualism, so the popular backlash is that damn near everyone is this thread (including myself) applauds the erosion of privacy rights because we're fed up and sick of living in a society with assholes.
If we can't govern ourselves voluntarily, we'll be governed by machines that we build.
We do desperately need to have income and wealth-adjusted tickets for these things though. A $20 slap on the wrist might be more than some people who are on the edge of homelessness can afford while a CEO might need a minimum of a $10k fine to even register for their attention.
I dunno, I find this framing by "Privacy Advocates" to be a bit... hyperbolic. When every little thing is the first step to complete tyranny, nothing is. To me at least these things are tradeoffs, and in this case it seems worth it?
If you want to modify your vehicle for performance on the racetrack, fine. But when you leave the racetrack, make it compliant again.
> If you want to modify your vehicle for performance on the racetrack, fine. But when you leave the racetrack, make it compliant again.
I can almost guarantee the cars you're annoyed with are mostly clapped out V8 Mustangs, Camaros, Challengers, etc. and large v-twin bikes like Harleys (I mean - they're probably literally Harleys). If that's the case then you can bet that these cars and motorcycles have never and will never see a racetrack - or likely even a backroad at a spirited pace for any period of their life.
All of the really loud cars and bikes I hear in SF are not performance oriented. The performance oriented ones... they go by before you even really register it. (Again - the whole point of performance cars is to go fast - not just slowly build RPMs from 10-30mph)
https://cal.streetsblog.org/2021/05/21/california-wont-be-ge...
In New York City, speed cameras started in school zones. I think that's an excellent place to start.
101 is 55mph for major portions of it. Yet, ain’t no one going 55 because there’s no reason to. We all can safely drive on it at 75 and that’s the prevailing speed right now regardless of what the signs say. Even 75 is low for many and you can go 85+ with no real increase in risk many times.
Speed limits like most laws are often set for the lowest common denominator, to harvest tax money, and/or as reactionary adjustments rather than based on reason/studies.
I had a few friends who said they would also put them in their windows, so we could have a few devices coordinate to confirm it wasn't just a loud neighbour or something.
I built a prototype, but when I started measuring how loud the motorcycles were, it was often within the legal limits (I think 80db or something).
Partly, this is because it was inside my apartment, but they sure sounded loud.
I spoke to a police officer friend about what to do, and he said the police just didn't care. I pointed out how easily they could use a decibel meter on their phone to measure how loud, but it was a complete non-interest for them.
Good to see NYC taking action on this. Hopefully more cities follow suit.
Phone microphones are not calibrated for this and the apps just spit out completely wrong numbers. They show relative noise changes fine but one phone could show the same sound at a higher or lower db rating just because the mic is a little more amplified or something.
The Apple Watch actually is calibrated for this and has a built in app which shows noise levels quite accurately.
Ostensibly this is because the incentives aren't aligned properly. The reason why many areas over-enforce traffic violations is because of quotas and incentive structures that encourage people to hand-out tickets. If you did the same thing with noise, you could actually encourage departments to try to enforce this.
80db is a measure of relative sound level, not the absolute level.
And vehicle noise levels must be measured at a specific distance to be useful.
Fantastic video with that very name exploring just how true this is: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8
It's extremely obvious which cars these are when you're driving at night. That these people are endangering dozens of other cars on the road is lunacy.
I would love to somehow take the ticket money from people who deliberately make their cars obnoxious, and use it to help people with shitboxes fix their mufflers.
Though my gripe about this is: Many of those cars have questionable registrations with mostly PA and FL plates. Those guys purposefully gun it for the speed cameras as the tickets go nowhere. The city installed a speed camera the block before me and one night walking home from the store I saw a supra speed down the block, a residential street, at 50+ mph with middle fingers out both windows for the camera. I want these people to die.
The window sales guy doesn't want you to shell out megabucks on his recommendation and then get no benefit. That makes him look bad.
An M3 isn’t cheap cash these days. Jaguars have this too (again, is that a cheap car?). AMGs as well. I mean - the list goes on even for more reasonable cars. Your Lamborghinis and Ferraris will vary but plenty of other exotics have them. Common with race cars as well.
I’m guessing most people here have just never watched any kind of motorsport - as these sounds are incredibly common in them. And - here’s the thing - these people like the sound.
Here's an example of what I mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DChy9sKVhEo
Somehow the police do almost nothing about this stuff (except what NY is apparently going to do), but the federal government has the time to force tesla to remove the "make fart noise after horn" option from my car.
Pop and bang tunes sound like utter shit. They make your car sound broken, and offer zero performance benefit.
In practice, it is more quiet and peaceful at night in a dense walkable city neighborhood, than it is in the supposed bucolic suburbs or countryside. Purely because the first does not have cars.
This enforcement is a great step, but the it's dabbling in the margins. Cars, and especially ICE cars, are fundamentally incompatible with a healthy and safe city life.
Not here in my suburb. The bulk of the noise comes almost entirely from katydids, crickets, cicadas, etc. There was plenty of car/truck noise at night in Manhattan, and it was particularly jarring when not among the hum of busier traffic.
As many have posted, loud motor vehicles are a quality of life issue for me (live on a busy street, near an intersection, and not far from a freeway). I am frustrated that obnoxiously loud vehicles are not policed. And, yes, I went through the “loud car stereo” phase of my own youth, including one ticket for volume.
My biggest fear is that police/prosecutors will become efficient at automating/scaling their prosecutions. Yes, consistency of prosecution is very important for encouraging compliance. Automated systems are less likely to be corrupted than human-centric systems where officers can choose to use their discretion for their friends/family or just people they are more likely to like.
However, we have soooo many laws, the more they are enforced, the more we will see how big of a burden the totality of law will become increasingly visible and painful to the average person.
That said, I’m not a fan of slippery slope arguments. So long as we continue to evaluate each of these automated systems as they roll out, I’m a fan of increasing quality of life through enforcing laws that are already on the books in a mostly fair way.
Some red light camera enforcement have proven to be schemes to generate revenue. Yellow light duration was shortened. Camera vendors have a revenue incentive to maximize the number of tickets, so they aren’t impartial and make pretty bad umpires.
Are there more details as to how this works and how it prevents false positives? Would the rumble or crack of thunder and lightning trigger a microphone to incorrectly mark a vehicle as loud? Or are there algorithms processing the recorded sound beyond just pure dB/volume to determine if it's actually a muffler?
A camera is a good visual representation of a vehicle being over a line, visual location speeding evidence accompanying data etc. This pilot project seems dangerously arbitrary. (Not a fan of overly loud vehicles but I am of civil liberties).
You wouldn't think twice about requiring private pilots to be subject to all kinds of safety and management rules and I think it's fair the same applies to roads.
If you don't want to take on this responsibility, take a train or bicycle.
Anti-social behaviors are actions that harm or lack consideration for the well-being of others. It has also been defined as any type of conduct that violates the basic rights of another person
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour
Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is listed in the DSM-5 under Disruptive, impulse-control, and conduct disorders and defined as "a pattern of angry/irritable mood, argumentative/defiant behavior, or vindictiveness"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder
As such, I think that along with tickets, repeat offenders should be required to attend some type of counseling
Living in the calm and quiet East Flushing, I now put my noise cancelling headphones on without anything playing, just to walk through the morning Manhattan.
The mosaic of noises is so jarring that I would come to my desk already all riled up, before I even sat down.
Holy cow I hate the whole "loud pipes" thing. Even when I was a horsepower person, I didn't want my cars to make excessive noise. It just seems unneighborly / antisocial.
And having grown up for decades before booming car stereos were even a thing, the lack of enforcement is unbelievable. It would be one thing on the road but people have zero care/respect to drive into apartment complexes at all times of the night at volumes you can hear blocks away.
We used to seize cars for repeat noise violations but some judge ruled that was illegal, some kind of "free speech" violation by the city/state. Which is insane.
My only concern with an automated system is false positives. I've gotten automated red-light tickets from in and out of state on my car when I've never driven to the actual city/location it was cited, it was a bad plate scan and I have to stop and dispute it online or they keep fining.
However, any kind of automated surveillance-based ticketing makes me nervous. We should be careful about turning off our skepticism about the misuse of information just because it's being used to punish people we have no sympathy for.
It took a very minor annoyance for people to not only accept these surveillance tools, but to actually cheer them on.
Particularly irksome given the high population density within earshot, and all the stranger given the fairly strict laws in Singapore which only recently outlawed electric scooters on the roads among other immediate effect measures.
Wonder if they'll follow suit with this, though the prevalence of the modded/sports car culture for showing off and the fact that having a car at all is rightfully seen as a privilege given the sky-high costs of ownership probably make it harder to do so.
Last year, all this stuff was racist and explicitly targeting minorites, and ACAB. Now, hail the new surveillance state! Go get those people who personally annoy me! This certainly will have no unintended side effects!
It is astonishing what they can sleep through. My wife and I are in the back bedroom and street noise that wakes me up they just sleep right through.
Just ban the stupid things on public roads and stop letting people register them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-54452835.amp
>> 7 October 2020
>> More than a hundred people have been threatened with fines after London's first noise cameras were set up to combat antisocial supercar drivers.
>> The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea set up the cameras to tackle drivers using Knightsbridge streets as "racetracks".
>> The cameras intercept when a 74 decibel noise threshold is exceeded and records the offending vehicle.
Win for the city budget, win for the people living in the city.
There's no place for loud cars in cities. One could argue no place for cars at all, but that's a separate story.
Is there a brave soul out there who will defend the right of cars and motorcycles to be ultra-loud?? I've recall seeing "safety" invoked as the reason on Reddit once.
https://nypost.com/2020/07/27/nypds-gunshot-sensors-lay-out-...
though if you're getting at concerns of government surveillance and integrity of data management then i'm sorry to burst your bubble..
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cia-secretly-collecti...
I can 100% guarantee a big rig running an unmuffled jake brake down a 50mph road is 10x louder than any motorcycle you have ever heard
Maybe you're thinking about Mustangs? - I think the engineers came up with a great solution!
But if the system instead forwards the videos to like the police department where a human reviews it before writing a ticket, it’d take the AI dystopia down a few notches. At that point it’s just an AI-assisted security camera.
There’s still the question of the integrity of the system. How do we know the microphone was working properly at the time of the recording? Or that the video wasn’t tampered with, etc.
I understand the desire to curb excessive noise, but anything that involves a faceless machine dishing out summons is a hard no. One errant ticket is hours of wasted time where you’re guilty until proven innocent.
If they really want to do this, pay for some plain clothes officer with body cams to wander through the city. That would likely be cheaper and prevent all kinds of other crime as well.
The opposite is probably true, given that that's probably a relationship between wanting to illegally modify your car and disregarding other automotive laws and norms.