Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud (2021) [video]
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This didn't happen in the places where I lived back in Europe because zoning laws were different. Instead of the sprawl of freehold single family homes separate from a dense urban core, these much quieter towns had a preponderance of moderate-density areas with mixed use buildings. This means people can live within walking distance to where they work and where they shop, so they do just that: walk through quiet streets, often surrounded with trees. This moderate density also translates into frequent and fast public transit.
Overall it is a much more pleasant day-to-day living experience. And it is not unique to Europe, you can get the same experience in Japan, for example. I hope we can learn from them.
I have never ever seen a soviet-era suburb which didn't have 4 to 12 story buildings with parks and aisles all around them and all kind of services being at a 5 minutes walking distance top (church, shops, post office, elementary and middle school, etc).[1]
Literally under every building you would find people quietly enjoying their evening on the benches while watching their kids play all around in safety and green. All of those neighborhoods would be perfectly connected with city centers by public transport. Can't think of any of those places where from suburbs to downtown would take you more than 15/25 minutes top.
You could literally fit tens and tens of thousands of people in relatively small but very livable neighborhoods.
But cars have long ruined these kind of neighborhoods by reclaiming those places for parkings [2] (imagery is from 2017, in 2023 it is at least twice as dense in cars). People don't really enjoy their evenings chatting to each other because benches have been removed and kid playgrounds have been moved blocks away and everyone is sitting in their bunkers, uhm, homes, isolated from each other.
Maybe I might be romanticizing but honestly economical progress is such an overblown metric and progress does nothing but make people more and more lonely, anti social and unhappy. It was miles better when I was a kid in Poland.
[1] https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/urban-area-style-soviet-peri...
[2]https://www.google.it/maps/place/Osiedle+Kopernika/@49.81612...
I think people especially in the US are quick to dismiss the Soviet Republics while ignoring what they did get right and the alienating parts of their own culture.
What do you think bloc countries and Soviet union were? Some kind of communist utopias? They appear to "didn't have dire poverty" because "social parasitism"[0] was a criminal offense for a long time. Like, police (sorry, "militia"!) could stop you on the street during work hours and arrest you if you didn't have a document from your boss or from a doctor allowing you to skip work. In later times "undesirables" were just forcibly relocated from "nicer" places [1]. Unfortunately description of these in English are quite lacking, but as a person born in USSR I can assure you that all the nostalgia for that times is either coming from old people who actually just nostalgic for their youth (old joke on the subject: - Gradpa, why are you keep saying it was much better under Stalin? - Because I could still get an erection back then!), or intentional political propaganda.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_parasitism_(offense)
The people who live in St. Petersburg and Moscow today are there because none of their families/ancestors were purged.
The ones who did are in Siberia, or dead.
Not knowing they worked for the stasi…
> People don't really enjoy their evenings chatting to each other because benches have been removed and kid playgrounds have been moved blocks away and everyone is sitting in their bunkers
There's nothing about economic growth and material wealth that requires this to happen. Something else must have changed.
> It was miles better when I was a kid in Poland.
Most things are better as a kid, without the worries of adulthood, let alone parenthood. I'd imagine the outlook for your parents raising you in the People's Republic may have been different.
City planning looks to be better for children and perhaps average families for the reasons given. Similar projects were also built in the west, e.g. in the UK, but since they were only for poor people they suffered from inadequate maintenance, security and so on. Those either get demolished, or the green space filled in with more buildings.
> Something else must have changed.
Cars, that was the point. A one-lane access road was originally enough for deliveries, maintenance and waste removal; it would later be widened, then cars parked (legally or not) along the sides of the road or sidewalks. No one wants to sit on a bench and stare at a parked car, and the cars (parked and moving) make it more dangerous for children to play unsupervised.
Agreed. When I was a kid we used to just roam outside (let alone walking to school and extracurriculars by ourselves).
That's no longer normal at exactly the same places even if objectively it is safer now. The perception of risk must be one thing that has changed but I think there's more to it...
Safer in terms of having less crime, perhaps?
What about the danger of being run over by a car on the way to those places? Nowadays we typically have more cars, with lower visibility, driving faster than before because the roads are wider, straighter and with more lanes. It is an environment that is plainly hostile to pedestrians and children in particular.
On the other hand, biking would be definitely less pleasurable and more dangerous for smaller kids now. Even as adult I don't enjoy biking with many cars around.
My stomach tingled just reading that, and then when I clicked the picture I felt real, panicked claustrophobia. If I believed in hell it would look like this. Maybe lots of people like living this way, but for me, no way. I'm a human. I'm not meant to be a bee living in a giant concrete honeycomb next to tens of thousands of bee neighbors buzzing around. I can't even imagine myself living that densely without having a mental break.
Cramped living conditions but ample communal space, so a lot of time is spent in full view of the neighbor (so they can report anti-communist behaviors to the local police). No individuality, identical buildings with the same layout for identical cogs in the machine.
And yet when the west does this, we celebrate it as "economies of scale": https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/subdivision-aerial
(well, as long as your tiny piece of lawn stays green, your house is one of the five approved paint colors, and your HOA dues/conformity-fines are paid)
I guess to the average worker in the East, these North American housing developments must have been seen as somewhat evil and not desirable at all.
This is less common than you think. There are 8500 or so malls in Europe[0]. I happen to live near an (expensive) shop, which I use because I like walking places, but I also know I have a tech salary that lets me buy a place that's in walking distance of a shop, and afford to shop in it regularly.
Also, plenty of people don't live near where they work. Not very hot take: while for any new cities it's a good idea to try and take emissions into account, the best driver for lower emissions and more convenience isn't large-scale city planning. It's Zoom.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/11-biggest-malls-europe-23271...
In America we only have mega malls with giant square footage and the only way to get to them is by driving.
When I have been in Europe I’ve noticed very little in the way of American style malls within any city (let’s take Amsterdam as an example). I do find “malls” that might just be a few offices with street level retail selling Jack Wolfskin products and maybe a Starbucks but they aren’t all that distinguishable from most of the rest of the city.
In Columbus where I live the metro has a population of around 2.2 million (all drivers) and we have two malls that are still operating (I think we’ve had maybe 5 at one point?) and one is Polaris Fashion Place at 1.2 million square feet and the other is Easton Town Center which is 1.6 million square feet. That’s probably average for a city in America.
So for an average city in America I’ve got 0 walking or transit to the mall - 100% only drivers, and I’m at nearly 3 million square feet which is like top 10 easy on that list too.
Europe has malls. Sure. The question is does Europe have malls in the same way America does, and I’m not convinced the answer is yes, which is what really matters. Well, not me being convinced so much as all the associated driving.
The two larger ones have commuter rail, metro, bus and cycle access, and parking for cars.
I'm sure the others have some parking, but it's not obvious as I've never used a car to visit one.
But, this city is the 'perfect' one, and there is a lot of range in-between. There are certainly large shopping malls in Europe with only road access, though they are almost certain to have bus services. Bluewater Shopping Centre just outside London is the first example that comes to mind.
However, the number of shopping malls is irrelevant; most shops are not in malls. In cities, there's generally shopping streets that have a wide variety of all sorts of shops. In suburban areas, there's often a small shopping center with one or two supermarkets, a Chinese restaurant, a snackbar, and a couple of other shops. Big American-style malls are rare here.
And supermarkets are very common. Just Netherland alone has over 6000 of them, and at least 6 of those are within 1.5 km from my home. There's a shopping center 500 m from my house, and a major shopping steet 1 km in the other direction. Stuff is dense, exactly because it doesn't focus on massive malls.
And for anything they don't have in my neighbourhood, I take my bike.
Of course this is a city; in small villages you'll probably still need a car for anything beyond bread and basic groceries.
Which was the original idea for them:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_mall#Downtown_pedestr...
But then car-centric urban design happened.
PM2.5 levels in Tokyo yesterday were like 6x WHO limits and absolutely no one on the local news was talking about it. Every morning I see pregnant and new mothers with infants or small children squeezing between belching diesel trucks, relentless car traffic, construction sites and smokers areas and wonder what the cost of all of this will be.
This is not a model for the future. It’s a relic.
What are you talking about? Localities sent a smog alert, made announcements on the speaker, and there was a whole thing. It was a particularly hot day as well.
I don’t have that many reference points to be fair, but almost every time I’ve checked general air quality (at least according to the first site that describes AQI) for Paris has always been worse than Tokyo.
Of course things can be massively improved. There is a lot of noise pollution. But the conversations are relative to other places. My reference points are limited but on points like air pollution or smoking other major cities fare worse IMO.
Though this is all super subjective, and even within a city various parts of it have a vastly different vibe.
Don’t really care what Paris is like, tbh. Shit air is shit air. Saying it’s shitter somewhere else isn’t super compelling.
The whole point of my original comment was that people elevate Japanese cities in ways they don’t deserve.
I think “Tokyo has better air than other metropolises” is a kinda verifiable thing, and if you grant that it’s kinda normal to consider that! There’s a reason lots of people end up here from other countries, and it’s not the pay!
Yep I know - but did you check how many monitoring sites they use and where they’re placed? It’s not representative of the actual experience of living here. If you’re walking, or cycling, you’re constantly in extreme close proximity to tailpipe emissions from cars and diesel trucks. The city also famously has lots of construction activity, almost always also belching diesel.
I've witnessed the construction in Tokyo. I'm greatly impressed by the steps they take to monitor and reduce impact. I've seen many sites with noise monitors displaying in decibels the current noise inside and outside the construction site.
When a building across the street from my apartment was renovated I was sent detailed construction plans. The work was scheduled so that any noise would never interrupt sleep or evening relaxation. Also include was how the sunlight and shade from the new construction would change. Included was steps to take if one wished to protest the construction.
Shitty is always relative, especially if you're comparing policy decisions.
There is loads of research showing a marked drop-off in the danger to humans from vehicle emissions as you move away from the kerbside. Even walking on the far side of a wide curb can significantly improve your prospects. My point here is that people are living in extreme proximity to tailpipe emissions, all day long.
It is a perfect candidate - perhaps the best candidate city in the world given how much else it gets staggeringly right on urban design - for strict tailpipe emissions regulations. Ban diesel trucks, introduce congestion charges, incentivise the adoption of EVs.
That is unlikely to happen, however, as Toyota in particular famously is one of the biggest global lobbyists for the internal combustion engine - a fact covered numerous times at length here on HN. That’s a fascinating political and economic story in its own right and one I’d encourage people to read up on.
Tokyo’s air quality is a story of corporate and political greed. Nobody does anything about it because no one talks about it.
Even where there are large roads, like near Shibuya station, there’s no street parking and cars are passing through, not driving across the sidewalk to every storefront. Pedestrians definitely come first. The parkades are often attended to direct traffic and pedestrians.
I can’t comment on yesterday but PM2.5 levels are often on the news.
Construction sites? Yeah, it’s a city. But most construction is fast. I now live in a small But growing European city and part of the sidewalk downtown has been closed down for three years for ongoing demolition of a building. Now it looks like construction is just starting. And this is for a 5 or 6 stores building.
Smoking areas outside of stations are gross in Japan but it’s rude or forbidden to smoke in crowded areas. In Europe people smoke on the train platform, at the bus stop and right outside of every restaurant.
I did think of one thing that is loud and annoying in Tokyo though: 50cc scooters. Making those quiet ought to be low hanging fruit.
In practice, when combined with the high density, it means that people are spending a lot of time outside, unprotected, in very close proximity to the tailpipe emissions from large volumes (often 4 or 6-lanes) of gasoline and diesel-burning trucks and cars. Often with narrow sidewalks or no sidewalks at all. They shop along the main road, their kids’ school is on the main road, their workplaces, gyms, dry cleaners, station, etc.
Lol at the people in this thread chiming in from their 3rd floor balconies in Moto-Azabu Hills. The absolute vast majority of people living in Tokyo are breathing trash air day in day out.
It’s reprehensible. They need to ban diesel trucks immediately, and they need to actively encourage people to switch to EVs.
I actually like the no sidewalk small streets, they have no parking and while some are sketchy they are more often like a mixed use path where pedestrians clearly have the right of way.
If you still think, in 2023, that humans can skate by with no consequences from relentless exposure to the by-products of fossil fuel combustion, I’d invite you to crack a book.
I used to live in NYC. Tokyo is a very quiet city. Not all parts for sure... you can have an apartment by a train crossing or they might build a highway outside your 6th floor window, but I would say that most of the parts where people live is pretty quiet.
According to [1], yesterday's peak of PM2.5 (not the 24 hour average) in Tokyo was at 22 µg/m3, whereas according to [2], the WHO's (extremely strict) limit for 24 hour average is set at 15 µg/m3. Where did you get your data from?
[1] https://www.aqi.in/dashboard/Japan/tokyo
[2] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(ou...
https://www.accuweather.com/en/jp/tokyo/226396/air-quality-i...
Clicking on the Learn more from Plume Labs takes you to the air quality data source.
https://air.plumelabs.com/air-quality-in-Tokyo-7Lj5
You can see graphs with the tabs named Live, Week, Month, Year. We can check past data there. The weekly graph shows 72 AQI on May 18th. The yearly graph shows the annual average of 39 AQI.
Can you confirm that you see the same data?
Likely the same extended lifespan that's been prevalent in Japan over the past century of smoking, diesel and construction (along with the occasional nuclear catastrophe). Humans are apparently more ruggedized than they look on paper.
Shortness of breath is something doctors report as a more and more common symptom of city dwellers.
Not reported on the news because nobody -- apparently you included -- cares, but I've been to doctors lately, and they complained that the lung and heart doctors are overbooked lately while the others have a normal load.
Generally, it takes a lot of pollution to counter the positive health effects of active commuting. It was a while since I did the research, but someone estimated that you need to cycle for more than sixteen hours per day for the pollution to outweigh the cardio benefits in the 90th percentile of cities ordered by pollution. There was no city for which any mount of cycling would have made you worse off.
Granted, walking is probably slightly lower in intensity, but still.
It’s been 15 years I commute daily by bike and worry about the side effect on my lungs… sometimes the road stinks so much, especially when too much trafic jam. Trying to slow my pace to breathe « less deep » but not a fun things to do.
So yeah we gave up and just go eat out. :|
So not only is the air bad, the walkable places are few and far between, strongly discouraging people to even go where the better air is or, as you said, just have the cardio from walking/cycling to improve your health.
Which non-Japanese cities are you comparing it to here?
While Tokyo does have no shortage of highways and cars they do have plenty of mixed zone medium density, walkable areas that are free from car noise. That is not a feature of any part of most US cities except maybe the CBD. It is also much more uncommon to find stroads in Japanese cities, while a stroad is the default for many western cities.
The neighbourhoods you’re referring to - walkable areas free from car noise - are open to the wealthy only. The absolute vast majority of people in Tokyo live with constant traffic noise and terrible air quality. Not to mention cramped living conditions.
As someone who moved to Japan it's always funny. I think people literally get their impression from Japan solely from neo-Tokyo sci-fi from the 80s. The country has taken some of the worst cues from the US.
Many cities like Tokyo are 75% suburban, single home, it's in fact the largest suburban region on the planet. The number of cars in the country is much higher than in the rest of Asia and many cities are extraordinarily sprawlish. From the air Tokyo literally just looks like a sort of denser LA (https://i.redd.it/mghcpc5xvt761.jpg)
If people are looking inspiration in Asia, Singapore is a much better place to look at, it deliberately designed around green spaces and avoidance of cars.
I love aerial photos of megacities like this. But I would say "a sort of denser LA" is understating it a little; each of the small buildings in the Tokyo aerial that are too tiny to make out are probably 5-6 stories at least.
Whereas, an aerial of LA (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Los_Ange...) shows that very quickly out of the downtown area, the small buildings are in fact single-story single family homes.
> As someone who moved to Japan it's always funny. I think people literally get their impression from Japan solely from neo-Tokyo sci-fi from the 80s.
Yes, I have visited Japan several times, multiple cities. My wife is Japanese.
But don't let that stop you. Please, continue.
I’m sure the total absence of zero emissions vehicle options has absolutely nothing to do with the political influence of the Japanese automotive lobby.
Is it worse than SA, London or any other megacity of the world?
Everybody wants clean air, they just live with the bad one because the big city pays well (though when you correct it for costs of living, it gets muddier).
While Dutch highways tend to have speed limits of 100-130 kph, the A-10 ring highway around Amsterdam has one section that's limited to 80 kph because it passed through a densely populated area of the city. There's big apartment blocks right next to the highway (and one offramp passes straight through a building), so traffic has to go slower to keep noise levels down.
If the US doesn't even do that, I think that tells you something about how much cars are prioritised over people.
Although of course noise barriers are just one of many tools. Less cars and having cars drive more slowly probably accomplish a lot more.
it would take more than changing zoning laws for that, as I understand changing jobs and such is not as common in these locations as well. If you are changing jobs every couple of years having to find a home in the same neighborhood as your new job may be a challenge.
Also I prefer not be limited in my shopping choices just to the single shop that happens to be in my building or on my block...
I live in a mid-sized European city, and I have literally dozens of shops within 10-minute walking distance of home, as well as several banks, primary and high school, health center, several playgrounds, parks, gyms, plenty of bars and restaurants, etc.
Do they all sell the same goods, or do you have "dozens of shops" that all specialize in a few things, like you have a bakery, coffee shop, produce shop, butcher,hardware store, etc all as independent shops
Or do you have a Kroger, Mejier, Walmart, HEB, Lowes, and HomeDepot style shopping all with in walking distance...
And I prefer not living with constant traffic noise and at risk of being run over every time I step outside. I prefer biking with my kid to his school, but we can't because the traffic makes it a suicidal idea. I also prefer to listen to birds when I walk to the shops nearby, but the traffic noise drowns them.
Yet, here we are.
I have no problems if people want to create something voluntarily that is walkable, I have massive problems with using government to do it.
We are on the same page, then. In most of American and Canadian cities municipal zoning bylaws force the construction of single-family homes and disallow the construction of mixed-use moderate density buildings.
With that in mind, one may begin to wonder if the reason we don't see more walkable neighborhoods is because they are currently illegal to build, not because there is no demand for them. And, indeed, there is plenty of demand for them.
Not everyone who lives the "way you prefer" wants it.
It's just the only place that decent-or-better public schools are, in a lot of US cities.
Everything else about the 'burbs sucks. Worst parts of country and city living, none of the benefits of either. Terrible.
The thing that frustrates me most about libertarians is how everything they don’t want is regulation or government spending, but everything they do want is provided by the grace of god or something.
So they have quiet bars were people quietly get wasted and quietly walk home? Quiet trucks quietly unloading goods for the shops every morning? Quiet dumpster trucks quietly picking up commercial dumpsters and quietly flipping them over every night?
If we had these in the US I'd be fine with mixed zoning too. As of now I don't hear any noise from the two lane arterial street behind my backyard but I used to live in an apartment with a window roughly 500' away from a small bar (just a local watering hole in a strip mall, completely inside, not trendy at all) in a direct line of sight and I had to sleep with a white noise machine because of all the screaming the patrons produced walking out (or in?).
People like both the dense urban core and the suburb single family home life style. They are very different modes of life. A lot of Europeans I know really like one or the other because they don’t really get them back home.
The solution to road noise doesn’t have to be a dramatic rezoning and a reversion to Europe everywhere. It could be to make cars and trucks quieter.
(N.b., I’m specifically not addressing SFH and housing shortages in this, hopefully that’s for a different thread)
Most of the noise comes from the tire friction and aerodynamics.
On the other hand, cities do not have the ability to redesign cars. A city can’t just choose to invent a quieter car!
I would love it if we can engineer cars and trucks to be quieter; I think though that a more feasible path for any city is to work on zoning and land use changes.
Engine noise only dominates up to roughly 20mph, at higher speeds the tire noise is the dominating component until roughly 100mph where wind becomes the dominant.
So this:
> The solution to road noise doesn’t have to be a dramatic rezoning and a reversion to Europe everywhere. It could be to make cars and trucks quieter.
Would mean both switching to electric cars and reducing speeds significantly to less than 20mph.
But even at average speed you’d see no noise reduction from electric cars since 20mph is the point where tires are as loud as the engine. So the average would need to go down.
One is that we need to come up with comprehensive solutions for reducing the number of vehicles in use. But that’s a difficult problem where solutions take decades and must be tailored to each scenario.
But what can be addressed now is the engine and exhaust sound levels. Some vehicles are loud because their engines are working hard, but many vehicles are loud because people (boys) want them to be loud. For some reason there is a large percentage of people who equate loud with good or cool.
Some of these unnecessarily loud vehicles are so loud that your home windows will rattle when they drive by. The worst are the Harley style motorcycles, but some crappy two stroke scooters can also be deafeningly loud.
Ironically, there is even an electric car in my village that makes a noise (to improve pedestrian safety), but the noise is so loud that it sounds like a street sweeper vehicle vacuuming the road.
Meanwhile, in this “peaceful” village I live in, there is always someone with some lawn or other machine making loud noise.
Essentially, noise is just another form of pollution that some people assume is unavoidable and just accept while others revel in producing.
Imagine buying aftermarket parts so your car would spew oil around it as you drive. Then imagine being proud because of how much oil your vehicle sprayed. It’s absurd, but it’s the same thing with boys and their loud toys.
Some cars are loud because people want them to be, most cars are loud because the noise the tires make when driving is loud, and that only gets worse the more cars you have around.
It only takes one engine in a thousand to drown out everything else. They are specifically designed to produce a "note" and explosions which are highly irregular and impossible to not hear.
Loud engines should be repaired if possible and destroyed if not. But total road noise should also be taken into account and accounted for with increased vehicle tax.
Actually, wait, there is one asshole on a scooter who locks his wheels & creates incredible shrieking horror "omg an accident is happening" sounds at every intersection he stops at. But that too is not regular tire noise, it's another boy child antisocial asshole.
There's different situations. Sometimes yes tire noise is an issue. The video has one of my favorite bits, 'why did this not take off? Because car makers are assholes' or some such. The aggregate noise can be a problem. But I think the video is spot on. Car drivers don't have any conception of how fucking obnoxious to hundreds of people it is that they blow their horn. They love shitty preening pathetic loud cars. It's only like 10% of them, but those 10% of car drivers are anti social assholes with enormous ability to make life much worse for everyone. And most societies have almost no restraints, no ability to create counter pressures against the anti-social.
A car going 50km/h+ is on some sort of a highway, where noise and pollution are less relevant. It's the cars going <50km/h on residential streets that cause problems.
Empirically, engine noise dominates then. The difference between ICEs and EVs passing by is staggeringly obvious.
I attribute it to two factors: - wide streets - modern cars' excellent isolation from the external environment. You don't hear the speed. You don't feel the speed. You feel all snuggled, safe and tight (seatbelts).
True, I live next to a 60km/h road (so everyone drives 80km/h at least) and I have been noticing that EV's are just as loud as ICE cars. The only difference is the ICE's have an additional tone to them, but that doesn't make them much louder to me, just different. However the real issue is motorbikes and mopeds which don't have any exhaust dampening (or removed it).
We don't need to come up with solutions. Countries around the world have already. Some of the larger cities in the USA have started making these changes and seeing results.
The solutions don't need to be comprehensive. While an accepted comprehensive plan maybe nice it does put all the planning up front and makes the projects take a very long time. Doing small things that push people to take other transport options doesn't need to take forever. As many cities demonstrated during the pandemic.
In the USA I think the biggest issue will be political will. But the one thing I'd like to see take off is cities removing parking minimums for new businesses or construction. The minimums were arbitrarily set and stop people from building small businesses. The parking minimums spread things out and drive the need to do something other than walk. Strong Towns has a video on it that does a better job than I can.
In short I believe comprehensive guide to being to reduce cars in cities exist at this point.
The biggest issue in the US is the will to change things. As you've mentioned, during the pandemic, we've seen how rapidly things can change when everyone is aligned in one direction. Whether you agree with those changes or not the fact is many cities had al fresco dining , and portions of streets reclaimed for it in as little as a year.
Another interesting observation I've had about the US is that commercial space for rent always tends to look way larger than it needs to be! Instead of subdividing a space and cutting the rent potentially in half many commercial units are huge and I can only imagine the rent is so high that only the big chains can afford to rent them.
Of course this also means that things tend to be a little less quaint and walkable, because instead of having 2/3 small businesses you have a massive chain in it's space.
I live in a fairly walkable area in Los Angeles (go figure right?) and I can't tell you the amount of giant open commercial / retail spaces I see that have been dormant for quite a while. I can't help but think I'd they were to slice up the space they would be filled in no time.
A 6 lane or 8 lane highway is like a big chemical plant. You wouldn’t want that in your neighborhood or near your city. It’s a big industrial site.
A tree-lined road with protected bike lanes, sidewalks, cars parked on either side, and a 20 mph speed limit is like a nice coffee shop just a few blocks from your house. It’s like a small business. You do want those in your neighborhood.
I’d also like to add, I just moved back to a neighborhood in the city and it’s much quieter to me than the suburbs. What you forget is that in the suburbs people are mowing and lead blowing and doing all those activities and they add a lot of noise. Didn’t notice as much when working in the office but noticed it much more when working from home. Now that I’m back in the city the car traffic noise is somewhat the same maybe a little worse, but the landscaping noise is far less prevalent and then I’m left with really not a lot of noise.
The long march of time will remove car-only infrastructure because it can't outlast economic physics, but we should do it faster to limit the damage and save hydrocarbons for spaceships and medicine and stuff.
Unfortunately we won't have our Triangle Shirt Factory or smog prevalence to really put the problem in your face. If we put some sort of coloring in car exhaust so you had to see it we'd ban cars within a year.
1) Harley's with open pipes 2) cars without any exhaust (common) 3) after market exhaust on import cars (thanks Fast & Furious) 4) garbage trucks, gas powered gardening equipment, 4x4's/big trucks, new muscle cars 5) scooters, mopeds, gas powered bicycles, motocross motorcycles (I get sideshows/giant groups driving up/down my street to the next location), enduro & regular motorcycles
The thing is is that there are already laws in place to deal with most of those..
No “car guy” is impressed by a busted up 20 year old BMW 318i with a popcorn tune, straight pipes, and rep wheels, but there’s a lot of barely 20-somethings who think it’s cool yet don’t know the first thing about how cars work.
There's a bunch of various things "kids these days are doing" because of social media and their craving of attention, that are frankly completely stupid and objectively bad, but get them attention due to being obnoxious. Carolina squat, stance, and popcorn tunes all fall into this category. Stance kids in particular /know/ they're doing something objectively stupid and dangerous and respond by putting "locally hated" stickers on their car. There's a lot of kids, especially in the West, without good family life and too much exposure to social media who will do anything, no matter how obnoxious or objectively wrong, to get attention, even negative attention. This is just how it extends to cars. We all hope they grow out of it, because otherwise they're destined to be wastes of the oxygen they're breathing.
If 50 years ago, cities prioritized travel methods for walking and biking, the noise pollution this video describes wouldn’t be so prevalent.
That's not a difficult problem (except in cases like sloped terrain etc.) - and the solutions are known and readily available. They are not even expensive, socially. The problem is:
1. Increasing awareness and understanding of the alternative and the solutions available to get there.
2. Translating public interest/will into political action by municipal administrative bodies.
3. Rearrangement of resources away from private expenditure on cars and their maintenance, and national expenditure on roads, into municipal (and perhaps national) expenditure on mass transit systems.
... and these problems, or at least their combination, is what's difficult.
There are non trivial problems to solve with EV in the city. Solve those instead of propping up age of fire dinosaur juice machines.
It is news of these days that, beginning in May there will be 24 "stewards" on fridays and saturday nights to help "educating" the customers.
With EVs slowly becoming more dominant in central London (most taxis, and many buses and delivery vans are electric now), I've several times had the slightly eerie (but happy) experience of being at busy intersections and noticing that it was unusually quiet. Then looking around and seeing that every vehicle waiting at the intersection was electric or plug-in hybrid.
Ah, we love the electric ones here in sweden!
Of course they have to stop ~20 minutes to recharge instead of just turning back.
And of course when it's cold (which surprisingly does happen in sweden) the batteries can't hold enough charge to do 1 run, so they can't run.
London's electric buses (mostly UK-built bus bodies with BYD drivetrains and batteries) have large enough battery packs for them to run all day without charging. They get recharged overnight, when electricity is cheap, while parked in the bus depots.
As of March, London had 785 fully electric buses in service, out of a total fleet of about 9000. The fleet is planned to be fully electric by 2034, which could be brought forward subject to additional funding.
It will be interesting to see if they stick with the overnight-charging model or whether charging while in service will make sense on some routes.
Do you have a source that they run the entire day with no charging?
[1] - https://www.kwik-fit.com/tyres/information/tyre-labelling
Studded snow tires are louder than other tires, snow tires without studs are softer than normal tires so less noise. Modern snow tires without studs are surprisingly good on ice, which is the only place studded tires can compete.
Noise levels is one of the things tires are rated by, but a quiet tire would normally require a softer compound and softer compound wears out faster than harder tires
It must be the same group of people with their anecdotes about seatbelts and airbags making cars more dangerous.
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/news/electric-and...
I'm an EV fan, but lower noise levels makes them more dangerous, not less, at least to the people they can potentially hit (of course for people living next to roads, noise is more hazardous from a more general health point of view). Cars are killer machines and stuff like seatbelts and airbags protect passengers but not pedestrians or cyclists hit by the car. So if you are a pedestrian or cyclist, then having the ability to hear the car is really great.
It's asking the outside people to shoulder the responsibility of avoiding the killer machine. I'd rather have quiet cars and much harsher crackdowns on drivers that use them in ways that jeopardy the lives of others. There are many things drivers can do to reduce the hazard, such as slowing down, buying smaller vehicles, using cars that don't isolate outside noise, only driving when in good mental condition, etc.
It's crazy to me that we allow cars that isolate their cockpit more and more from their surroundings (quiet, small windows, high up from the ground) and instead ask the surroundings to avoid the danger.
I know, ultimately it is each person's own responsibility to avoid death, and it might make sense for the legal system to reflect that. But we don't have these laws with other dangerous things ("it's okay to practise throwing molotov cocktails in public squares, as long as you wear bright clothing so people know to keep their distance"), so cars are sort of an outlier.
I get what you're saying, but IMO, that just wouldn't work well.
If you want a better system, it's better to make as many changes as possible to the system so that problems are impossible and/or unlikely.
Personal responsibility will always have it's place, but it'll never be particularly reliable.
> It's crazy to me that we allow cars that isolate their cockpit more and more from their surroundings (quiet, small windows, high up from the ground) and instead ask the surroundings to avoid the danger.
Being quiet and high aren't issues here. Drivers aren't going to hear pedestrians - not at 30 mph. And I've never been in a vehicle that had windows that I felt affected my awareness, aside from the rear window of the Prius.
> I know, ultimately it is each person's own responsibility to avoid death, and it might make sense for the legal system to reflect that. But we don't have these laws with other dangerous things
Sure, but that's because there's enormous social utility in allowing people to drive cars. If there was a similar utility in letting people throw molotov cocktails, then there'd probably be some sort of dispensation to do just what you suggest.
I disagree with this premise.
If you want to make a system better, you need to enable as many information flows as possible, shorten feedback loops, etc. The classic Meadows leverage points. The proposal of making cars noisy has the opposite effect, by sweeping problems under the rug.
Just "doing as many things as possible" is a great way to paint oneself into a local optimum.
It's adding a layer of redundancy. The driver needs to pay attention but should that fail, hopefully the car noise will alert the pedestrian, who should also be aware that a car is nearby.
I ride a bike. I don’t ride a loud bike: it’s still within Australian limits for sale, but it has some volume, and a little bit of lower end thump.
Two bikes before that I rode a 250cc four cylinder bike, that did up to 18,000 RPM. It, again, was within Australian limits, although honestly not by much.
In the middle of those two, I rode a 600cc bike that was significantly quieter than either of those.
My riding remained mostly the same, but one of the three I had significantly more people changing lanes while I was quite literally right beside them.
I don’t believe that ridiculous straight through drag pipes on high displacement twin engines are necessary, but being as loud as another car absolutely saves lives.
I don't think it has to be, it is definitely a safety feature that they make a noise, but these people try to justify burning petrol to do this passively "positive" thing
It's enough of an issue that early Priuses beeped while backing up.
I'm a look both ways kind of person, so I don't really "get" it, but I can also understand that not everyone prioritizes situational awareness.
You can hear in all directions but only see so wide.
A backup beeper is a safety feature purposely installed on trucks because it helps to hear that the truck is backing up before it runs into you.
That said, I still look both ways before I step out into the street.
Sound can only be used for positive identification - if you can hear a car, it's there. It cannot be used for negative identification - if you can't hear a vehicle, it doesn't mean anything.
This is because there are far too many factors that are at play when it comes to the ability to hear:
- Not every dangerous vehicle makes appreciable sound - an ICE car with its engine off, an EV, a bike, any other small personal transportation device, even a skateboard
- The sound may be masked by another, louder sound
- The sound may seem to come from a different direction, there's no telling how the surrounding environment will reflect the sound around before it's reaches one's ears
- The human crossing may, like you point out, be on autopilot, distracted, or otherwise not perceptive to sound
Because of these, and likely more, factors relying on sound when crossing the street is a horrible idea and will get you killed.
I cannot emphasize this enough, looking both ways when crossing *is mandatory*!
Not going to make as much difference if you live near a motorway though since the tyre noise there is really really loud. (I still think it might make some difference though because engines going at 70mph are really loud too.)
At low speeds modern gas cars are almost completely quiet too.
And not to forget the tire noise is still quite loud compared to people just talking
And the smell! It suddenly smelled as if I were in the middle of a small rural town, instead of a major metropolitan area. That's the main reason I'm rooting for EVs to take over; unfortunately, they're still way too expensive.
I think trucks are 10 times louder than cars. I walk by 20 cars idling at a stop light and 20 cars driving in the other direction. The noise doesn't bother me. The car exhaust doesn't bother me either.
I stand next to one diesel truck idling and the noise is really loud and the exhaust makes me cough.
If I could make any changes I would get rid of diesel trucks first.
Also quite annoying is ambulance/police. They are really loud.
When visiting Alicante, Spain, I couldn't believe the constant honking all around the city. I caught an ambulance on video, sirens blazing, stuck in a roundabout for like 10 minutes right outside a hospital. Something about the driving culture just seems so wildly disorganized and impolite to me.
Over time cabins in vehicles have gotten more isolated with better sound systems. Outside has gotten generally louder. Both of these things mean the emergency sirens need to be even louder for it to get a drivers attention.
I'm not sure if it is because drivers don't hear/see them or if they just don't care anymore, but almost every time I see a firetruck with it's lights and sirens on lately, I see it have to come to a stop and wait, get on the even louder horn, before drivers start getting out of its way. This isn't down the whole length of the street or anything, just once or twice before it drives out of my view (several blocks). I don't think I ever saw in person this before 10 years ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/us/sirens-noise-ambulance...
(The contrast is particularly stark against e.g. cycling where you can just match pace with a stranger and hold a brief conversation about whatever happened.)
For one thing, everyone in other cars have their ACs and music on and cannot hear the honking anyways. So you’re not communicating with them anyways. And if you’re honking at pedestrians in a first world country you’re driving wrong.
It's used for when I think someone hasn't seen me (ie. reversing), or if the lights have turned green and the person isn't paying attention. The latter will be a bump on the horn (so about 100ms) where I doubt it gets up to full volume.
People are quite happy to wind down the window in order to show their displeasure with a hand gesture where I live.
It did take me 6 months to adapt to the very frequent emergency sirens, mostly fire/ambulance. It was jarring at first but now I've mostly tuned that out.
Then there's garbage trucks with their very loud backup beeps several mornings per week, and construction noise that starts every morning at 5am.
The worst are people who double honk every time they go around a corner in a parking garage, even at 11pm. That's not really a thing in this area so I'm assuming they learned that habit elsewhere.
In short, even though you got used to the noise, your brain didn’t.
May I ask why?
Cars aren't loud, car SPEAKERS are loud.
The subway. Ambulances. Construction. Garbage truck compactors. Guys trying to get you into their restaurants. Panhandlers. Buskers. Customers haggling with street vendors. Hassidim on cellphones negotiating deals. Mothers on cellphones giving relationship advice. Laughing teenagers. Drunken couples having fights. Cops chit chatting with each other, or arresting people.
People have recorded the sounds of NYC and during the pandemic someone posted this to YouTube for nostalgia.
I've traveled to 35+ cities and they're all quiet compared with New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/us/sirens-noise-ambulance...
This, while the video is showing a virtually empty space. It doesn't matter that it's right outside of a train station if there's no one around!
Trucks and buses going over speed bumps, now that's much more annoying road noise (when there's a speed bump on a moderately busy road just outside your bedroom window)
Frequent emergency sirens and car alarms, they're pretty loud and sleep-interrupting.
Intoxicated groups of people making their way home at 2am can seen very loud too, in the worst way (yelling/arguing/singing badly)
Skateboards are surprisingly loud too.
This gives me nightmares about my last apartment. Not even the same situation, but the specific nature of this reminds me that you don't even know what's going to be a bad situation until it happens. I lived next to a road that did not appear to be busy and had a 35 mph speed limit when visiting. That road turned into a major artery for people going to and from work during morning and afternoon rush hour, with most drivers going closer to 45 - 50 mph. My window didn't even face the road, but the constant doppler shift sounds of the cars echoed down the alleyway into my bedroom window. I started to hate that sound.
Pedestrians also crossed that street frequently, and I'd occasionally hear car crashes if I was working from home. It always happened from someone stopping short to avoid killing a pedestrian, and the car behind that car rearending it.
I thought I'd learned my lesson after living directly on a busy street. That was even worse. People would constantly honk in the right lane because the car at the front of that lane would be turning right, but might have to wait for a pedestrian. It was infuriating. They're several cars back in the right lane and can't see what's going on so they have to assume the person at the front of the lane must be asleep at the wheel, so they honk. I wanted to get out there are inflict corporal punishment on anyone who honked.
Yes, cities are loud.
Construction is loud, sirens are loud, leaf blowers are loud, lawn mowers are loud, dogs are loud, gunshots are loud, airplanes are loud, helicopters are loud, parties are loud, trains are loud, HVAC is loud.
Suburban has been between the two extremes, but the noise leans toward the rural end of the spectrum, though Harleys aren't the cause, car dependence and lack of transit options are as predictable from the walk score.
Reasons are easy to state: Harleys and the quiet but unusual confines of a single floor flat in the city (at least in the United States).
In comparison, all other noises can be easily ignored.
In certain parts of NYC people just blast music from large speakers to small Bluetooth devices, even on public transportation.
Here is the 311 data for noise complaints and see how many are not car related.
https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/311-Noise-Comp...
In Uruguay, especially, the bus fleet was awful in the 80s and 90s. They were very old, made a lot of noise, and polluted like hell. There are many electric buses nowadays and the old Leylands are gone.
You don't see electric buses in Brazil and most of the noise comes from diesel buses and the small ones are the worst (I think this is regulatory failure, not a technical issue).
Man, I wish my city would buy EV buses.
That video might just as well have been made by the Dutch tourism bureau (if they even need one!)
But people are loud too. I live in a suburb and even it is unbearably loud. Neighbours talking outside next door. Dogs barking. Car doors opening and shutting. People playing loud music. Emergency vehicle sirens. Little kids playing or screaming.
The point is, more people = more noise and therefore yes cities are loud necessarily.
As someone with pretty severe misophionia, I can't wait to go rural. Even then the sound of chirping birds will still annoy me but at least I can remove the majority of people created noise from the equation.
Edit: In 2018/19 lived temporarily in a condo for a right downtown in Toronto's Entertainment District. It was pretty good at filtering the noise when the doors and windows were shut. But when the Raptor's were in the NBA playoffs crowds flooded the streets and you could hear their chants and cheers inside the condo even with everything closed. It was a nightmare and very much "people being loud."
Yes, lots of us work on computers and have metropolitan hobbies.
Huge numbers of people don't. It's an empathy gap.
Cars aren't worse or better, they're just different. You can't have NYC with LA's parking and you can't have LA with NYC's parking.
We dedicate a huge amount of the public space to personal vehicles, and it is the sort of solution that basically creates its own problem, with the uptake of cars necessitating urban planning that make it necessary for an uptake in cars. Rinse and repeat.
It should be possible to discuss this rationally. I see cars as having tremendous faults, yet I own two of them.
They fail to realize that huge swaths of America is pretty much permanently stuck with pedestrian-unfriendly infrastructure.
Can you show an example?
> abandoning most of your existing habits and hobbies
Why would you do that? The only hobby I know that requires a car is racing, and you have race tracks for that.
> city folks
What if it's not just city folk tho :)
There are good parts, of course, but I think it’s very reasonable to ask whether we get a good value from something we collectively give up so much for.
Looking from anywhere else in the world - how car-centric USA is - is fucking insane. Minor regional differences doesn't matter, you're still out there in the top right corner, category of your own.
BTW one of the result of this is that somehow Americans think only people living in big cities don't like cars. Like WTF? What does one have to do with the other?
Cars are plain worse. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-transport-mode
> anti car bias on HN
I more worry worried about the anti smashing your fingers with a hammer bias on HN
> It's an empathy gap
It is an infrastructure spending gap.
cars go on it like 30 km/h cause it's so narrow. No need for any infrastructure.
If the road is wide enough for cars to go faster - it's wide enough to fit pavement (one side at least). Pavement can be very narrow too - 1 m is infinitely better than no pavement. I've even seen 0.5 m pavements but that's stretching it :)
If the road is so narrow you can't fit pavement there - it's probably safe already.
But I've seen roads in USA and I think you just have no comparison on what "no space" means.
I hate it when I go hiking in a nature park and there comes (illegally) people to ride bikes and quads on the trails. But even on the road, I hear those damn motorcycle's engines for tens of km in that silence.
I remember one summer hearing a particularly annoying instance, that then stopped, and after a while an helicopter. We presumed he had gone into a ditch. Found out later that it was exactly what happened.