Moving from Palo Alto to SF things got way quieter.
My previous home office had spray foam insulation with double layer sheet rock and bass traps on the walls, yet I still had to have a small homemade box around the microphone when I was doing any sort of voice work that wasn’t more informal.
Sure in a city a loud motorcycle may go by, but that's like 10 seconds of noise? Compared to a revving leaf blower for an hour (and usually there are a bunch of them going).
They're even banned in Palo Alto, but it's not enforced.
They only banned gas-powered blowers and they seem to rely on citizens to report use.
That's hugely hyperbolic.
But in the city there really are constant sirens, car horns, diesel trucks, construction noises, roadway noise etc...
The most comprehensive study done on this (admittedly a long time ago in 1970) shows a clear correlation between population density and noise pollution.
https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/gtr/gtr_ne25/gtr_ne25_183.pdf
I think the most likely explanation is that you moved from a particularly noisy suburban neighborhood to a particularly quiet urban one.
Mostly because of lawn stuff and garbage pickup. Also probably a factor that I’ve been in new city buildings with good insulation and not on the ground floor.
Garbage pickup is once a week, and the truck is close enough for me to hear it for maybe 15 minutes. Double that for recycling pickup.
I live a few miles from the city center, in just about the densest area where people still have lawns. There are maybe 5 houses close enough to me that I could hear a leaf blower from if I’m inside the house (loud enough to notice). Even if each one runs a lawnmower and leaf blower for half an hour each week, that’s 2.5 hours per week tops (only 2 of them actually use leaf blowers, and most only cut the grass 1x every 2 weeks). Also in most of the country mowing only happens a little more than half the year.
Compare that with road noise, and sirens, which I hear far more often.
Around me, there are three different recycling pickups (one for the each kind of recyclable). Combined with regular trash pickup, it means that the garbage truck is here on most work days.
Down in San Diego the noises are much MORE noticeable because many houses have poor or no insulation at all, and the windows are single pane (or open).
# vehicle/person probably doubled since then.
I eventually moved because they ruined my peace and quiet, and because I was getting sick of the 5' snow drifts starting in October.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
Video discusses this thoroughly. There ARE quiet cities amazingly enough. And suburbs are a HUGE source of the noise IN the cities they surround because it's the car traffic from suburbs into the cities that makes much of the noise.
Cities ARE loud, but they don't HAVE to be.
On regular roads it's 50 km/h. There's one like 300 meters from my flat.
On a few big multilane roads it's 90 km/h or more but the closest such road is 700 meters from my flat, and it has these noise-cancelling panels around it.
I can't think of an exception to this in any city I've been in, honestly. Which cities have lots of clubs and bars with loud speakers out the front? Is that common in the states?
Half the problems with America seems to be lack of regulation and the assumption that it can't be changed :)
Like our party was able to carry a bazooka around openly in one state :)
A perfectly practical solution would be for the town to designate "outdoor power equipment times" such as "Saturday, 10-4" or "any day, 10-12, 3-4" or similar.
Electric is helping but even then there's noise created from just the action of the device, and you also reach a paradox where as things get quieter the remaining noise sources become more annoying.
In terms of decibels cars are indeed louder. But not all noise is created equal.
I have noise-cancelling headphones - they do a great job removing white noise(so traffic, among others), but aren't too effective against sounds with a more focused spectrum like people yelling in the middle of the night, bottles being broken or trash being collected in the middle of the night.
Paris is very densely populated - I'm surprised anyone attempts to drive there, because at these densities and distance between buildings it must be horrible.
My point is: it's not that clear cut. Removing cars is what makes places like Paris bearable, but the problem lies in the sheer population density that a truly walkable city over a certain scale requires.
I moved to a city that has 2/3 the population density of my previous location and even though it's just swamped with traffic, it's actually quieter on average.
I feel like population density is completely left out of the conversation. From my experience there's a middle ground between car-oriented suburbs and human pile-ups like Paris(or other cities approaching this density) which is rarely explored.
There is no magic, just legal regulation and it just works. Switzerland and Japan are good examples.
The Dutch city of Delft in particular is just intentionally designed to care about noise. Both design and regulations. Turns out that when you simply prioritize reducing noise, it's actually doable. And it's still a city, albeit a modest-sized small city, not a major regional hub or a global-level metropolis. But the lessons can be applied anywhere.
Everytime I get passed by an e-bike my brain has a little pleasure seizure from not having to suffer the expected rawkus.
But subjectively I don't mind the tire noise nearly as much as the sound of an accelerating petrol engine.
It would sound like something out of a William Gibson novel.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qe1wuDsXVk
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvX7NnlhiOE
Bonus: Kia's sounds like an ambient synth track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdZwVJPN0Ow
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu_1JM_UiuA
This is because the manufacturer is based in Quebec.
The first time you shouted my eye was twitching. By the third time I could almost feel a stroke coming from the increase in noise pollution.
Humans are so susceptible... pfff
Currently live in a dense city in Asia. Remove all the personal vehicles and it would still be noisy as hell. Just business vehicles delivering food, removing trash, etc. are a decent amount of noise. The high building density reflects and concentrates the noise.
Then add in construction, road work. Even the worker moving trash bins around by hand every evening is loud.
Pure fantasy to have dense city living an little noise.
Using car horns at cities is forbidden anyway, unless there's a crash or a dangerous situation you shouldn't hear them. I can't remember the last time I've heard a car horn in my city.
I've lived in countryside and in several places in 2 different big cities in Poland, and except for one time I lived near a big 4-lane road in the middle of the city (which is a disgrace of communist urban planning BTW) - cities were quieter than the countryside.
Cars are going faster in the countryside and dogs are constantly barking at night at anything that moves.
BTW another factor is windows quality. It significantly changes how quiet your home is.
Since all else isn’t equal, you could design cities that are quieter than the most suburbs. But you could also design suburbs that are quieter than most cities.
In the US at least I linked a study that showed cities are far louder on average.
Once you have density high enough you can't live in separate houses. People move to commieblocks or other kinds of multitenant buildings. This shifts everything closer together, makes public transport profitable and having a car becomes optional. These kinds of neighborhoods are quieter than the countryside usually. It looks like this: https://spoldzielnialsm.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Obecni... https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ud9-Z0UHVHg/W7-qUjfNT9I/AAAAAAAAi...
Or if you're insane you can mandate enough parking space that this doesn't happen and instead you have highrises in the sea of parking lots.
Now we live in a not-so-popular area built during a great housing programme in the 60s ("miljonprogrammet" in Swedish) and we love it. Lots of green areas, all parking is in the outer perimeter so we have almost no traffic. The modern areas built in town are nowhere near as well planned from a life quality perspective.
I am not anonymous (nor even pseudonymous) here, so I might as well mention that the area is Vilbergen in the city of Norrköping.
Its really annoying for WFH
Adding to that list: The poisoning of every downstream waterway for miles. The further south you go, the worse it is.
Driveways can, admittedly, be handy but you don't need a whole lawn for that. Just turn the driveway sideways and butt the whole thing up against the road. Boom, just as much parking and space for trailers or cleaning your boat or whatever, and you can cut out a few meters of lot depth with minimal loss of functionality. Of course, building codes mandate lawns, so that can't happen. Meanwhile I dream of a world where everything's ~10% closer just because we don't have suburban front lawns.
I also sometimes wonder how many amazing parks we could have if half the money everyone put into maintaining their front lawns went to that, instead. Put half the money and half the land into that and we could have an awesome park on every other suburban block, and still save money and space.
I live in the densest neighborhood in Austin (West Campus). Sirens are rare, and car horns are moderately uncommon. Construction noise is near-constant during the day, as are big trucks related to the construction. Car noise is ever-present, but more of a problem on the larger roads. (I'm currently sitting outside a coffee shop on Lamar and the traffic noise is indeed constant and terrible.)
The two biggest sources of noise pollution in my neighborhood are 1. the construction and 2. leaf blowers. Leaf blowers might be third if you split the construction-related trucks into their own category.
Insane suggestion: record the dump trucks every night (using good microphones - maybe even hire some), build up a compendium of recordings, get a really good speaker and amp setup (absolutely no buzzing/hissing/hum etc), then play the recordings in a loop progressively increasing the playback volume throughout the night so it's as loud or even louder than the actual dump truck when it arrives. In this way you may be able to acclimatize (exposure therapy). It's quite reasonable that you might need to raise the volume very slowly to begin with (maybe even have the playback volume effectively muted at the start of the night) such that it's still very quiet by 4am and you might still get woken up by the dump truck and then need to stop the playback for the night to get back to sleep; the idea/hope is that you would be(come) able to increase the volume to the necessary level by 4am and stay asleep, this may take a few goes. It's also possible that quality of sleep might not be absolutely 100% to begin with (perhaps turn down the volume/progression if this is the case). It might work though? (I wonder if this would fall within the 2-week habit-forming period, such that you'd acclimatize within a fortnight...)
Spending too much time in hardcore noise insulation can induce tinnitus, which is then pretty likely to stay around forever.
With good ones, the silence is deafening. Ambulances and super strong winds are one of the few things that break through.
And besides that you get better insulation for hot summer, cold winters, etc.
Do you have more information on that? A quick search did not yield any results.
> I’m about done with this nonsense and about to move out to the burbs so I can sleep through the night.
Trash trucks run at 4am in the suburbs too. The absolute best is when the truck sits in one spot, in reverse, for 5+ minutes - for no discernible reason at all.
There's a myth that groundskeeping is more costly without them, but the city of LA reported that costs didn't significantly increase after banning them.[1]
[1] https://www.dailybreeze.com/2018/08/21/redondo-beach-bans-le...
A... myth? Have you ever used a rake, and a leaf blower? How about for many hours?
If there's no change in costs when switching between the two, it's getting hidden or absorbed somewhere. It takes substantially less time and effort to use a leaf blower than a rake for the vast majority of tasks that call for either.
Like it's okay if things have a slighty not perfectectly tended to appearance.
There's beauty in chaos.
Arguably there could be even more beauty in not even raking them! That doesn't mean leaf blowers and rakes are comparably cost effective, though (as implied by the claim I replied to).
In fact most of the times the city will provide a truck a few times a month that will vacuum the leaves from the road, provided you push them all to the curb.
Not every suburb is this desolate, cookie-cutter hellscape like you see in places like Texas. Many of the historic neighborhoods, especially in the northeast, have real reasons to manage foliage.
And if you think leaf blowers are bad, just remember, people just used to collect them into huge piles and just burn them (still do in very rural areas), or worse yet, just toss their bags of leaves into the trash can. Leaves and landfills are a bad combo. With yard waste collection, towns will compost them and turn them into compost or rich soil: https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2017-12-18/you-asked-we-answere....
I fucking loathe chain saws...Get a damn axe!
I fucking loathe lawn mowers...Get a damn scythe!
I fucking loathe loud diesel trucks...Get a damn wagon train!
I fucking loathe cellphone ringers...Get a damn semaphore!
Seriously, until you've done a full day's landscape maintenance yourself, you're not qualified to talk about leaf blowers. Luckily battery powered leaf blowers are getting better, and will be up to most households' maintenance needs soon, hopefully. I believe we're still a ways off from battery blowers being good enough for commercial crews though.
Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil the temporary owner is trying to destroy by monocropping homogeneous “grass”, I’ll hope that generally makes collecting organic matter to waste wrapped in individual virgin plastic bags obsolete itself. Groundskeeping could do with a 21st century ecological update… we even had the native plants movement in the 80s
I dunno, what about mulching it in sítio?
Leaf blowers are also futile in wind.
You're doing your own reductionism. Not all leaf blowing is to collect leaves for disposal in plastic bags (and I'm 100% for using leaves as mulch where they fall on beds, and also with not having lawns). Leaves need to be blown out of gutters, drains, and ditches - otherwise the road will start being eroded. Leaves need to be removed from paths and patios, otherwise they will stain the concrete, let moss grow, and make the surface slippery. You try doing that by hand on 8-10 properties in a day, on minimum wage, without health insurance (the situation of most landscape maintenance workers in the US) - and then tell me that banning leaf blowers is a good idea.
Leaves on the lawn can easily be mulched in place and used to build up organic matter, as you point out - but that too requires a gasoline engine powered machine. The call should be for banning lawns, if that's the concern - not banning leaf blowers.
(I should also mention that if you don't live somewhere with a real winter or dry season that causes heavy leaf fall, your situation isn't representative.)
The standards to which we maintained things were far, far lower in the past because doing so was much more laborious and therefore expensive.
The areas of the garden with trees would be a different thing.
Neighbor here blows for 2-4 hours regularly, carefully hitting every sq in of the lawn. Most of that time is spent blowing clean grass, with the nearest leaf (there are only a few to begin with) being a doz yards away.
I am not morally opposed to leaf blowers, just the noise that is foisted on everyone else by their use. I couldn’t go down to my garage and rip the throttle on my two stroke motorcycle for two hours once a week without getting the police called on me, yet the leaf blowers have become normalized. It’s nuts.
I used one once. It was fairly useless. The bag was too small to collect any sensible amount of leaves and it choked on the small twigs and other stuff that is often mixed in with leaves if there are mature trees in the vicinity.
Every few months my old petrol leaf blower is used for about 30 mins to clear debris off a gravel path that has proven impossible to rake, and when this blower dies I'll get a battery one.
At the time John Howard was PM and was setting the controversial precedent of refusing to reside at The Lodge - he instead insisted on living at another government owned residence in Sydney (Kirribilli House).
So. The caretaker died when a tree fell on him while he was using a leaf blower during a storm to clean a property that was not even being used.
Madness.
The tradition of speaking in public using phone’s loudspeaker is the close second in terms of cultural inadequacy
To me it changes the mental end of the week cleanse. When the routine of nearly everyone gets changed it affects everyone. My generation going back to my father's and before kept Sundays quiet. Nothing to do with religion it was just a day everyone seemed to agree was the quiet day. Now in the past 10 or 15 years it's changed dramatically.
It really is, if you're on a block where a bunch of people use a maintenance service it's very possible to have 2-3 hours of commercial leaf blowers at least once a week for a few months. It could be twice a week if you happen to have a situation where let's say the east and west side of your block each have 4-5 houses who use a service but the middle doesn't. That usually means 2 different crews will independently do it at different times. The block itself might only be a few hundred feet (10x quarter acre properties on each side) so it's extremely noisy for everyone on the block.
Then factor in being kind of close to a fire house and there's a massively loud siren every day at noon and random sirens / fire trucks for emergencies. Oh you live 3 miles from a small airport? Ok, there's going to be planes flying in / out almost all the time. Oh yeah, did you know they do helicopter training every Monday and Thursday night from 8pm to 10pm, so now you get to have your house shaken every 10-15 minutes while a helicopter flies a few hundred feet over your block while doing laps.
And you have trees too where Blue Jays love to pretty consistently squawk. That sounds like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6P7k4np0Js, but it carries far. Once one of them starts, it's like a chain reaction for 15 minutes. Even with windows closed and headphones on it's easy to hear it. I've had to stop recording videos because even a dynamic mic (very directional) will pick it up.
Suburbs are really loud.
I suck up and chop the thicker drifts with an electric vacuum device, and mulch them. There is some noise, but no-one can hear it over the blowers.
Two sound sources that don't bother me at all are songbirds and kids playing.
With this one you're getting into the intersection with US cities' rabid opposition to actually building enough housing, so new units become labeled 'luxury' whether or not they're actually luxury, because zoning and permitting requirements push the prices of new units into the stratosphere.
The Long Island City neighborhood is ground zero for this. Studios going for $3k a month that are no bigger than a dorm room.
And then there’s the noise pollution. The proliferation of delivery apps has caused an explosion in the number of gas powered scooters on the streets. Many of the delivery scooter riders enjoy “souping up” their rides by removing/modifying the mufflers and driving as recklessly as possible. Due to the giant holes in the walls left by the PTAC units you can hear them wizzing by every few minutes from 2PM to 11PM.
And then there’s the “fart cars”, dirt bikes, and ATV gangs, but those have already been addressed by others.
What stroke me the most during my trip to the US (Chicago) was:
- the constant police sirens
- the fact that cars come with a feature that allows you to find them with their key by making them honk. Here it is forbidden to honk in cities (though people do it all the time, sigh).
Equally awesome is a beepy, late-shift neighbor who's driveway is right by your bedroom window.
[1] Or maybe had been, seems they're on decline. Albeit when powerful BT speakers were all the rage (like JBL Flip), they were overused in public spaces as well.
If you have to "slap"¹ someone, and you will have to least you live in the desert, you will have to learn how to do it and to do it properly - effectively, proportionately, optimally. If you don't, then it's downfall in your quality of live and everyone else, and the environment and property value. It's the foundation of civilization to pull each other up towards civilized behaviour. Those areas in which reciprocal correction left way to "anything goes", I have seen, have decayed to rubble (and from heights).
(¹Yes, reference.)
To be honest, my hesitation is based on the number of local news articles that surface every so often. There's an alarmingly high number of Google results when you search for "zwrócił uwagę pobili" (he made a remark, they have beaten him) [0]
This may be in general a cultural factor. Even in non-violent contexts some people just do not want to be told what to do. I think Sarmatism [1] echoes to this day in many layers of the society in the form of ill-understood "freedom" [2]
Now, I may be selling Polish society short, most people are reasonably polite and the above are deviations, not the norm. But these deviations are still visible.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=zwr%C3%B3ci%C5%82+uwag%C4%99...
Seriously though, people should understand that night is for sleeping and walls do not offer perfect sound insulation. Everything you do can be heard and can disturb someones sleep. I struggle with this all my life.
We should be protecting sleep quality like we protect water quality...which I guess considering how bad the water is in certain parts, may not be the best analogy.
Or on a Sunday... :) Although the washing machine/dryer are usually in a utility room in the basement, shared between everyone in the building, which makes it a bit harder to just turn on.
People from the US even speak louder :)
He shouldn't have to IMO. Building codes should require buildings to be sound proof between units. Yea, I know that's dreaming but I've lived in such units. I once lived in an apartment in LA. It was the first apartment in my life that had an in-unit washer and dryer. I asked the guy showing me the apartment "I'll bet I shouldn't run that after 10pm". He responded "These apartments were built as condos and they have double concrete walls between units so your neighbors won't hear you. Feel free to run them anytime day or night". And, the 18 months I was there I never heard a noise from any other unit.
Conversely, I lived in a fairly typical SF place. Older and not designed for sound proofing. It was so bad that I mostly stayed out of my bedroom because the just being in it the guy downstairs would complain. Basically all I ever did was walk in, climb in bed. When I woke up, get out of the room. I felt for the guy, it must have been like a drum but at the same time I shouldn't have not been able to live in my apartment (oh, and I didn't wear shoes).
I had a guest room. Every single guest (friends, not AirBnB) would get yelled at their first night just trying to change out of their clothing into their pajamas.
The funniest one was a girl moved in downstairs. One night at 3am I moved my bed about 4 inches. A single move not making a sound for more than 1-2 seconds. The next morning she came up to bitch me out of waking her up. I told her I didn't complain about hearing her masturbate every night. I just put on my headphones and checked in 20 minutes. She moved out the next day.
I feel like the law should have made the landlord make that apartment more sound proof.
In my current place there's an industrial air conditioner running on the building next door. It runs 24/7 even though no one has been in the building during COVID. With any window open it's around 60db which is fine maybe when you're awake but it sucks when you're drying to go to sleep. With the windows closed it basically sounds like someone is running a vacuum cleaner in the room next door, all night.
Further, some, the city, or some company, comes by at 4am and empties trash cans. The pick them up and bang them. It takes them ~10 minutes to get them all. Everyone in the building has complained and AFAICT both of these are illegal.
https://www.sfdph.org/dph/files/ehsdocs/ehsnoise/guidelinesn...
But so far it's been impossible to get anything enforced.
With modern buildings, where all windows and walls are completely airtight and there is no natural draft any more because of energy efficiency, the buildings would start to mold if you turned off the ventilation.
They could, yes, but that depends on how much money the constructors spent. Some will go for the really fancy stuff that the janitor can fully control from their office, with everything relevant (air inlet and outlet temperature, tenant-individual air consumption, CO2 levels, ...) being measured and every tiny little actor (valves, bypasses, flaps) controlled in a carefully balanced flow that achieves optimal efficiency, while others will go for extremely dumb systems that offer little more control than "here's the circuit breaker, if you want more control you gotta climb to the roof and fiddle with the valves".
> Or put some lube on the device?
I doubt the problem is lube (unless it's actively creaking, and at that point the building management would be well advised to have the system inspected because that's a fire risk). Usually the problem is inadequate dimensions, caused (again) by financial decisions... basically, similar to a PC, the larger the fan the less RPM it needs to haul the same amount of air, and the less RPM it runs the quieter it is. Larger fan systems need more space (obviously) and are more expensive to purchase.