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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

I find by far the biggest disruption in US suburbs is lawn equipment. Suburbs are louder than cities imo because there is always a leaf blower, lawn mower, and weedwacker going at all times during the day within 100 yards of you. Often for hours.

Moving from Palo Alto to SF things got way quieter.

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>Suburbs are louder than cities imo because there is always a leaf blower, lawn mower, and weedwacker going at all times during the day within 100 yards of you.

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.

It does sound ridiculous but I’ve lived in DC, London, and SF now and all were quieter than the suburbs I’ve lived in.

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.

If the insulation isn’t the same, you can’t really compare the 2. I could take a nap in an active construction site with good enough earplugs.

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.

> 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.

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.

That's definitely not the norm in the US. A quick google search shows that less than 1/3 of US houses have access to curb side recycling at all, much less weekly recycling for extra items like glass.

Insulation is a huge factor - up north the sounds are as present but much less noticeable because the houses have to be insulated, and have double-pane windows.

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).

IMO it's more that the city sounds all blend together into one harmonious cacophony, whereas in the suburbs, it's mostly quite except for that one incredibly loud, obnoxious sound. Always Sunny has a great episode about this.

I don’t doubt that people are more likely to notice sounds in the suburbs because they aren’t habituated to them. But saying the suburbs are louder is like saying it’s actually quieter to live next to a gun range than it is to live next to the woods, because when the occasional hunter fires his gun you are more likely to notice it.

There’s really not that much road noise in a lot of cities unless you live near a couple of particularly busy streets.

The study I linked showed that on average there is.

Yeah, 50 years ago when there was 120 million less people in the United States and households were bigger yet had smaller houses/lots and owned a single vehicle. Power lawn equipment was more expensive back then too - most of my family used push mowers up until the 90s.

# vehicle/person probably doubled since then.

I lived on a 10 acre plot in the US northeast for a while, in a cozy cabin. I had the best neighbor, and old guy who owned the 200 acres mostly around me and let me hike around on it. He eventually died and some dipshit CEO of a healthcare company bought the place, logged most of it, and then gave it to his kids, a teenager and 20-something, both boys. The kids would come up all the damn time and drive their lifted trucks, quads and unmuffled motorbikes with their friends all night long, and then shoot all afternoon and night. It was way outside city limits so anything goes. Of course I tried talking to them, and they just thought I was some loser old guy trying to stop their fun, and their dad simply didn't give a fuck. There was no way the tiny police department that we shared with a neighboring town would even care.

I eventually moved because they ruined my peace and quiet, and because I was getting sick of the 5' snow drifts starting in October.

Cities aren't loud, cars (and trucks) are loud

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.

Sure, but neither do suburbs. You could mandate everyone drive electric vehicles with tires optimized for low road noise.

Tesla going 90 km/h is almost as noisy as regular car going 90 km/h. Engine noise only dominates at low speeds.

And what is the speed limit right outside your house/apartment?

On small roads between the blocks ("strefa zamieszkania") it's 20 km/h. Also pedestrians have right of way over cars on these roads everywhere, no matter the crossings. Usually these roads are made of bricks and have these "bumps" so you won't go much faster even if you wanted to. That's the closest road to me (like 50 meters from my flat).

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.

It's worth adding that 90%+ of Polish drivers ignore speed limits...There's hardly any police or speeding cameras (apart from a few selected areas which everyone knows about, and does not speed there), so the speed limits really work on sort of "opt-in" basis.

Eh, sure, but on the local "strefa zamieszkania" nobody goes over 30 km/h. You hardly can go faster there.

1. Notice I said tires optimized for road noise. 2. Most suburban homes in the US are far enough from roads with 55 mph speed limits that high speed road noise isn’t penetrating the home.

And most residential areas in cities have a 25-30mpg speed limit

Well, given that the whole suburban sprawl style is also financially reckless and unsustainable, the answer is to get rid of car-dependent style of development and life entirely, not just tweak it by going for electric cars.

How about the non-stop construction and non-stop road work? How about clubs and bars with outdoor speakers? Helicopters, industrial cooling/HVAC. I could go on. It's far more than just cars. What are these quiet cities that magically have none of these things?

I never noticed, walking around the nicer European cities, that any of those things made nearly the same level of noise as the cars. Seriously, walk through Paris or something and tell me that clubs and bars and helicopters and AC are even nearly as loud as the cars when you walk next to a busy road.

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?

Miami, NYC, LA to name a few. And it's far more prevalent now since covid as most places have some outdoor seating now and they've seemingly all installed speakers.

It's banned in all Polish cities I've been to. And for a good reason.

Half the problems with America seems to be lack of regulation and the assumption that it can't be changed :)

America fascinates me because half of the time things are functionally unregulated, and the other half of the time there's a law about Kinder Eggs and the exact height your lawn must be.

We're playing Call of Cthulhu pen&paper RPG campaign set in modern USA. Our DM has to check the laws in each state often, and usually it derails the session by how completely absurd it is.

Like our party was able to carry a bazooka around openly in one state :)

Was that Old Man Henderson? https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDGreentext/comments/2hpuvq/old_ma...

I'd be careful extrapolating too much from a literal reading of state laws.

The HN demographics would regulate things to the point of absurdity if left to their own devices. In the US they only reach critical mass to do so in affluent suburbs, so you get stupid local laws about lawn height and other attempts at legislating conformity. Occasionally they get thrown a bone by the federal bureaucracies or legislators on some meaningless issue that nobody will care enough to oppose. This is how you get lawn darts and random food products effectively banned (not that lobbying doesn't also result in odd small things being banned too).

I don't know what the demographics of HN are, but while reading this I had similar sentiment. I don't like having to hear leaf blowers, but I really don't like other ppl telling me I can't use one. All regulations have a cost; I think I just weigh the cost more heavily in principle than many folks here.

Things like leaf blowers have solutions between "Wild West v8 supercharged beasts" and "every leaf must be hand picked up by your current cadre of indentured servants".

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.

There's a very simple solution. Include externalities in the prices. Most people won't be able to pay for gas, problem fixed.

Pretty hard to price negative effects of noise pollution into fuel prices though, since it includes long term health, as well as property values and other things with massive confounders.

You can measure it. Find N pairs of regions where all factors except for noise pollution are similar, measure price of land differences, average them. You have the cost of noise pollution.

That's unfortunate, and definitely sounds like a problem that should be dealt with. For whatever reason the same thing didn't happen in Australian cities which are structurally quite similar to North American cities so it's not inevitable.

Try the less nice ones then.

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.

I...have walked around the less nice parts of Paris? I'm not sure what your point is. In the less nice parts of Paris, the noisy areas are still mostly the areas with busy roads. It's simply the biggest source of noise pollution in cities and I haven't found anything that comes close. Maybe in specific areas you can find people playing obnoxiously loud music with helicopters buzzing over constantly but that's certainly a very specific and hopefully rare set of circumstances. The same with yelling and crime and so on. If that's the default in your city I'd agree you have vastly greater problems than the sound of cars.

Not much a problem in my city, but those which I've been to that are seen as "walkable" and with a "vibrant city life". Essentially all places with considerable tourist traffic.

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.

I certainly would agree that Paris isn't an ideal city. My experience has been that cities with 1-2 million inhabitants with reasonable, but not extreme, density (i.e. much denser than suburbia but less dense than Paris) have been the most pleasant.

Some of Paris is nice, quiet, leafy arrondissements. Quite a lot is not.

That's not my point. My point is that the noisy parts are the parts with cars, and the areas without many cars do not have anything approaching the noise levels of busy roads. I am aware that not all of Paris is quiet and leafy...

> What are these quiet cities that magically have none of these things?

There is no magic, just legal regulation and it just works. Switzerland and Japan are good examples.

As the video I posted mentions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

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.

And electric vehicles are a lot less so.

Everytime I get passed by an e-bike my brain has a little pleasure seizure from not having to suffer the expected rawkus.

vehicles are make noise with the engine and wheels, so light electric vehicles are super quiet, but heavy vehicles tend to be loud regardless when moving fast

Fair point

Electric cars are certainly far from silent, and somewhere at the high end of city speeds they are hard to distinguish from other cars because most of the sound comes from the tires.

But subjectively I don't mind the tire noise nearly as much as the sound of an accelerating petrol engine.

It all sucks. High pitched tire wine, unbalanced thumps. Diesel engines are the worst.

When I’m walking next to a busy road (which the only two multiuse pathways near me are next to), it’s quite loud and most of the noise is tire noise. (To the point where you have to shout to have a conversation with someone walking with you.) Those trails would be much more pleasant without the cars there, electric or not.

True, but tire noise is sort of proportional to both weight and speed and electric vehicles are on average heavier due to huge batteries. So a fully electrified city would have a very different noise profile but not necessarily quieter or louder.

I am dreading an EV dystopia where all vehicles are going slow enough to create a cacophony from the mandated low-speed sounds.

It would sound like something out of a William Gibson novel.

it's worth testing indeed, that said these car sounds are under control, not impossible that in slow dense urban spot you can lower them

I apologize if this is a silly question but is that currently mandated or is this something that will likely be mandated when the EVs become dominant? My impression was that they are currently relatively silent but that might just because they are always in proximity to a combustion engine idling next to them.

Currently mandated - newer electric cars make this noise that I would put somewhere between "future theremin"[1] and "terrifying alien chorus."[2]

[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

There are electric school buses in my area that emit the sound of the Montreal Metro when driving at low speeds:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu_1JM_UiuA

This is because the manufacturer is based in Quebec.

It's funny how my brain reacts to all caps very similarly as if someone is literally shouting in front of me during a conversation. Must be the decades of internet forums and emails.

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

Not true at all.

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.

Cities aren't inherently louder than countryside. Car traffic is noisy, but the volume is proportional to the speed. Cars going 30 km/h aren't THAT noisy. You don't hear them through the windows. Cars going 90 km/h are VERY noisy and at that point it doesn't matter if they are electric or not - you mostly hear the tires and the aerodynamics.

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.

All else being equal, more people = more noise.

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.

You cannot have significantly more people/square meter with everything else remaining equal. Cities are like stars - quantitative change in density causes qualitative change in behavior.

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.

We moved to a townhouse 2km from the city centre after living 15km outside the city and the difference in noise is staggering. We had a mildly trafficked 70km/h road about 150m from our house (with a property in between) and the noise from that road was more or less constant. We could hear cars from almost a kilometre away over the open fields, so one car per minute meant almost constant noise.

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.

That sounds great. I hate cars and traffic and trains.

round me its just leaf blowers for ~4 hours everyday a few months a year

Its really annoying for WFH

Lawns—especially front lawns—are connected to a weirdly-large number of problems in the US, when you think about it. Noise pollution, excessive water use, more driving (all those barely-used front lawns take up a ton of space, which pushes everything farther apart by a significant distance). Fuel use and air pollution (mowing, trimming, those damn leaf blowers—though at least some of this is going electric).

> Lawns—especially front lawns—are connected to a weirdly-large number of problems in the US

Adding to that list: The poisoning of every downstream waterway for miles. The further south you go, the worse it is.

Oh yeah, good point. And since they're manicured and sprayed with all kinds of pesticides (and lots of fertilizer, which contributes to the downstream poisoning you note) they're not even helpful for any kind of preservation of natural life. They'd like some kind of taxidermied version of a healthy natural environment.

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.

So, I'll agree that suburbs are likely quieter than the city, but those particular items definitely vary by city and neighborhood.

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.

I've always found cars to be much more disruptive in the suburbs because they drive so much faster in the suburbs. Cars drive by a suburban sandwich shop that I like to go to so fast that they shake windows. The speed limit on the road is 25.

They may be louder but do you have a dump truck waking you up at 4am several times a week? I really don’t know what to do anymore. Obviously they need to pick up trash that early to beat the traffic and save a few bucks /s. But the city doesn’t care and I’m constantly told that condos/apartments are a more sustainable way of living. Thats great but I’m about done with this nonsense and about to move out to the burbs so I can sleep through the night.

Do yourself a favor and get some earplugs

Earplugs do essentially nothing to stop low frequency sounds. I can block out a lot of noise with white/pink/brown noise, but the only thing that will stop sounds you can feel, whether it’s an idling truck or a sound system cranked up, is substantial mass and/or decoupling from the source.

i got these Bose QuietComfort noise cancelling earbuds, and they are like magic, cancelling out bass noise from nearby outdoor stereos. i can't believe how well they work. I live by the beach where people play loud music---the concrete walls do OK for the midrange and treble noises, but not the bass.

The person you're replying to is talking about feeling in their body, not hearing in their ears.

I see what you're saying, but I think that's too narrow of a reading of his comment, but it doesn't really matter.

You say that, but it helped my sleep tremendously

I'm not saying earplugs don't help at all, just that it depends on what the source of the noise is. For me, the noises that are most stress-inducing are extreme low frequencies that vibrate the building, and earplugs don't seem to help much with that.

"Normal" suggestions: earmuffs or earplugs; soundproof your bedroom (IIUC certain types of window roller shutters can mitigate noise); move :/

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...)

From what I’ve read and experienced, exposure therapy to bothersome noises can have the opposite effect. Be careful trying that!

sounds like literal torture. i don't think you are joking, but it's hard to be sure.

> earmuffs or earplugs

Spending too much time in hardcore noise insulation can induce tinnitus, which is then pretty likely to stay around forever.

If you can control your environment i.e. you own your home, get triple glazed windows.

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.

> Spending too much time in hardcore noise insulation can induce tinnitus, which is then pretty likely to stay around forever.

Do you have more information on that? A quick search did not yield any results.

Sounds like the expensive sound setup should be used to do active noise cancelling around the head part of the bed.

Move to the suburbs?

> They may be louder but do you have a dump truck waking you up at 4am several times a week?

> 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.

In my small town pop. 50,000 Sundays were super quiet no stores open, no lawnmowers. But the lawnmowers not running wasn't a law it was an unwritten rule agreed upon by all. Now everything is open on Sundays and Sundays are noisy with lawnmowers.

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.

> Often for hours.

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 feel the average leaf in our neighborhood gets blown off a lawn four or five times before it decays or gets bagged. It's a great business model!

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.

It drives me absolutely insane. I can’t record audio virtually anywhere unless I treat the hell out of the room. I shouldn’t have to turn my room into a soundproof bunker to be able to record some voiceovers. It’s ridiculous.

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.

Yeah - the joke is people say they move to suburbs to get 'peace and quiet' compared to a loud city, but city life is so much quieter (at least where I live). I'm sure that's not always the case, but I really hated the lawn equipment.

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'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.

I fucking loathe leaf blowers. I can tell what day of the week it is by which neighbor is going for an hour or two straight with the leaf blower. Get a damn rake!

Ah, leaf blowers. The planet is warming and still, the little hooman burns oil to move leafs forward, waking up the entire neighborhood. Those things should be banned worldly.

I can't find it, but I remember the story of an individual who lead a crusade against leaf blowers and was somewhat successful.

Leaf blowers are the worst. Several cities in CA have banned them. I don't know why more haven't followed suit.

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...

I’m in Folsom, Ca. I wish they were banned here.

I live just north of NYC in suburbs and leaf blower bans are never enforced. Not worth the time of the town or the city to bother dealing with the rules they create. It stinks.

> There's a myth that groundskeeping is more costly without them

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.

Maybe you don't need to track down and collect every single leaf?

Like it's okay if things have a slighty not perfectectly tended to appearance.

There's beauty in chaos.

Yep. That falls under costs being "hidden or absorbed somewhere."

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).

Lots of HOA's will be right up your ass if you don't take care of the leaves on the lawn. That's one of the reasons I won't buy anywhere that has one, but a leaf free lawn requirement with a leafblower ban seems punitive.

The crowning jewel of the cognitive dissonance is that places where people who complain about noise live and places the HOA would be up your ass over petty stuff are mostly the same places.

Perhaps you have never experienced mold issues due to excessive fallen foliage then? Or a copperhead nesting in a pile and biting one of your children? These things happen frequently. Or perhaps your neighborhood has a nice tree canopy, but the excess foliage causes a safety concern to motorists and cyclists alike. There are good reasons to clear excessive leaves that don't involve only looks.

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....

Indeed! Leaf blowers are a complete menace to any semblance of peace and quiet.

> I fucking loathe leaf blowers...Get a damn rake!

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.

Reductio ad absurdum

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.

> Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil

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.)

How did landscape maintenance workers perform that task before leaf blowers?

How did people cope before cellphones existed? It's the same as my original point - it's a nonsense question. If you want to create additional work for people by doing it in a less technological manner, focus on the served in the society rather than underserved, who are trying to get a leg up in the economy.

They didn't.

The standards to which we maintained things were far, far lower in the past because doing so was much more laborious and therefore expensive.

It works seem that those lower standards have no significant adverse effect. They only impact trivial stuff like aesthetics.

You couldn't slip on wet leaves and expect to sue the property owner back then.

You didn't have trees in lawns, basically. Look at the pictures of old English manors - there would be hedges next to grass lawns but the trees were few and far between in the lawns.

The areas of the garden with trees would be a different thing.

I don't know about England, but trees were common in American lawns since long before leaf blowers existed.

50% of the time my neighbor's maintenance company spends with leaf blowers is chasing individual leaves across the yard and through shrubbery (not exaggerating). They'd save themselves time if they just bent down and picked up the damn leaves with their hands. Or -- novel idea -- left the last couple leaves anyway, because just as many more will accumulate 30 minutes after they leave.

Fully agree. Leaves happen. I'm just pointing out (apparently in a too sarcastic manner) that the technology is the best we have right now for clearing a lot of leaves within a ton of manual labor (raking leaves over a large area is a decent workout). Banning a technology when its overuse is due to poor landscape planning is a knee-jerk reaction that doesn't address the underlying thing that's really causing the frustration. I.e. we'd all be better off if houses had gardens designed with lower maintenance requirements in mind.

> 50% of the time my neighbor's maintenance company spends with leaf blowers is chasing individual leaves across the yard and through shrubbery

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.

The point is exactly that leafblowers do not represent a technological improvement: they have too many downsides, and accomplish too little. No one is arguing that all technological progress is bad. Rather, in the specific case of leafblowers they represent a detriment, and should be used infrequently-to-never.

I was a landscaper for several years before college. We mostly serviced estates in the country or with very large lots. I used both a backpack blower and handheld. I understand the efficiencies gained by their use in some instances. I also know that on the smaller residential lots that a big backpack blower was overkill. A rake could have sufficed more often than not. In the case of other equipment; a lawnmower can’t reasonably be replaced with a scythe, it will not produce adequate results, a weed eater can’t be replaced for the same reason. A rake can produce adequate results with only a bit more work. And in cases where a blower is “necessary”, it doesn’t need to be used to chase every damn leaf for two hours on a residential property.

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 don't even understand the point of them. They don't clear up the leaves. A leaf vacuum cleaner would make more sense.

> A leaf vacuum cleaner would make more sense.

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.

(UK here) I have a large lawn (longest diagonal is 40m) and many mature trees and I also hate leaf blowers with a passion. I now have some proper rakes designed for leaf sweeping - approx 75cm wide. I can clear the whole area in about 90 minutes (approx once per week). I have a tall collection sack and a set of the large plastic grabs that let me pick up huge amounts in a single go. The speed trick is to avoid pickups for as long as possible, working a 'wave' of leaves across the lawn. I pick up piles from the leaf-side of the front line and don't ever try for a complete pick-up, so the ones left behind simply get raked a bit later. The collected leaves are dumped, unbagged, in a massive pile that grows throughout the collection season. In the summer I mix my grass cuttings in and in autumn (a year after the first leaves were added) I have some superb weed-free mulch. The raking also helps keep the lawn in good condition.

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.

Maybe I'm really weird but I don't even bother raking leaves, I just run over them with the lawn mower and let em decompose on the ground. I do sometimes have to remove some of them from the driveway but I do that with my hands and takes like 5 minutes.

Years ago there was an unfortunate incident involving the caretaker of the official Australian Prime Minister's residence in Canberra (The Lodge).

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.

This is a joke right? I should keep a diary. Someone did a study and apparently the 'city that never sleeps' (NYC) has better sound quality than my city (PHL). Between inept and behind by 115 years and counting on gas line repairs and ATV squads... not to mention the broken exhaust fan of the corner pizza joint, one cannot exist in Philadelphia and expect a modicum of peaceful bliss.

It baffles me that cars with ultra-loud stereos that trigger car alarms are legal and people who drive them aren’t fined regularly.

The tradition of speaking in public using phone’s loudspeaker is the close second in terms of cultural inadequacy

Leaf blowing to the other side and then another leaf blower needed to blow it back.

Madness.

Relevant New Yorker article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/25/blowback

Nevermind giant pickup trucks rumbling down the streets.

Don't forget circular saws, nail guns, and your neighbor's project car that hasn't had a muffler in 3 years.

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