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I think you’re focusing on the wrong issue here. Engine noise nowadays is a lot less of a problem than tire noise, especially with cars going 50km/h+.

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.

Not my experience. I live next to a 40mph dual carriageway which is an arterial route. The road noise is pretty much constant, and I don't find it that disturbing (although my recently-moved-in partner differs on this). What is disturbing to everyone is the sound of loud-exhaust boyed up sheds which drive past pretty much every day. There's one guy who has made his car backfire, and does this pretty much every time he drives past, at around 11pm each night. Incredibly annoying, selfish behaviour.

IMO you are both right at the same time, there were even studies published here on HN saying that background far-away engine noise is very harmful for the humans when we're exposed to it for prolonged periods of time.

It's not that simple. Tyre noise produces a roughly "white noise" profile. This kind of noise is easy to attenuate using physical barriers and people can sleep with it (some people even sleep better with it).

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.

There's a key relationship you're missing here. The closer a car is to humans, the slower it will drive. The slower it drives, the more important engine noise is.

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.

>50 km/hr inside cities is very common nowadays, especially in N. america.

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).

It's the stroads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM ("Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous (and they're everywhere) [ST05]")

Turns out when you design a road for high-speed driving, people will drive fast on it.

My experience is the same as other commenter's, standard road noise is basically white noise, the people with loud cars (I'm not a car guy, but probably messing with the exhaust in some way?) is what you notice. The worst offenders are even louder than a fully loaded dump truck.

> Engine noise nowadays is a lot less of a problem than tire noise, especially with cars going 50km/h+

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).

I live next to a large road in NYC and for me the cars that are loud intentionally are by far the biggest problem when it comes to noise, followed by sirens and horns. The things that are designed to be noticed are the most noticeable.

I also live in NYC: typical vehicle traffic is background white-noise. I absolutely agree that the major disruptive noise sources from cars are sirens, horns, alarms and obviously-illegal exhaust modifications.

There are zero cars making disruptive tire nosie at 2:00am in my neighborhood.

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.

As I've already gone down the urbanest/transportation rabbit hole and have watch every Not Just Bikes video and other stuff in that space, I have a different perspective than you. I do think I would have shared some of your views a few years ago.

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.

Definitely agree.

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.

Related to noise pollution a good framework for thinking about cars and car traffic is comparing them to industrial activity.

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.

If you want to further the analogy you can think of those of us screaming about car-only infrastructure and the negative effects caused by it as the same people screaming about pollution during the industrial revolution.

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.

I live on an artery/thoroughfare in SF. My street also has a 10-15' retaining wall along one side that faces a small valley on the other. The noise on my street is extremely loud and echoes throughout the whole neighborhood. My favorite days and nights are Sundays when streets are the quietest. Here's how I've ordered the worst offenders in my head.

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..

I’m of course happy covid is a bit more under control, but I can’t help but feel sad we’re back to the noise levels we had pre-covid. For a short period of time near the beginning of the pandemic we got to experience Bay area cities without being surrounded by extreme levels of car noise pollution; it was incredible to imagine what that would be like as a normal part of living here.

To be clear, I am speaking for pretty much all “car guys” to say we also hate popcorn tunes and stance too. These are both (inter-related) trends only popular with the very young and very low class promulgated via Tik Tok.

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.

I don't think they're talking about the tuners, but rather the good ol' boys and their trukks, rolling coal being an extreme example.

I'm pretty sure they're talking about popcorn tunes (also called "crackle tunes") which intentionally makes your car backfire so it sounds like a poor man's version of rally anti-lag, but in the process destroys the catalytic converters, fuel efficiency, power output, and is generally obnoxious. Rolling coal isn't even a thing in Europe, and the folks I was responding to sound like they're in Europe.

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.

I'm pretty sure they're talking about lots of things, primarily vehicles that "make your windows rattle". Popcorn tunes don't do that, the frequencies are too high and the impulses too quick. The description fits Harleys (as literally stated in their comment) as well as big rumbly trucks with knobbies and a straight-piped exhaust.

Texas is full of "adult" men who want their trucks (and any type of vehicle made by Dodge) to be louder than stock. If their exhaust doesn't set off car alarms when they drive by, it's not loud enough.

To your first point, I think it’s a mistake to assume that the current situation is the natural result of our cities, where as it’s actually policy decisions that add up over time.

If 50 years ago, cities prioritized travel methods for walking and biking, the noise pollution this video describes wouldn’t be so prevalent.

> reducing the number of vehicles in use. But that’s a difficult problem

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.

My experience living in a relatively quiet area has been that the loudest vehicles, by far, are garbage trucks followed by other kinds of trucks. But it is much harder to do something about that because they serve an economic purpose and it would presumably be very expensive to make them quieter. It's a lot easier to blame people with gratuitously loud cars and motorcycles because they don't have a real excuse, even if they have less of an impact in absolute terms.

Garbage trucks are on any given street for maybe 10 minutes a week and they save you a trip to the dump. Reducing the noise on them would be great but this is not nearly the most impactful way to solve the city noise problem.

I have to say there’s a strange fixation on making ICE quieter. EV’s are so quiet you have to add things to them to make a little noise so they don’t run people over. I’d much rather see cities move towards EV and build out EV infra than try to figure out how to make Rube Goldberg machines more complex to reduce their noise by 10%, while not addressing the rest of the ills.

There are non trivial problems to solve with EV in the city. Solve those instead of propping up age of fire dinosaur juice machines.

I don't think OP is referring to the ICE that are already making some efforts towards quiet, I think they're referring to the engines that to the casual observer seem like they have a horn instead of a muffler to maximize noise output.