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Comment by vladvasiliu | Hacker News Reader

As a motorcyclist, if I had a penny for every time I've heard the "loud pipes save lives" mantra, I'd be a millionaire.

It always felt like "a load of bullpucky", but the defining moment for me was one day riding down a quietish-street with a legal-but-still-obnoxious Akrapovic pipe. In front of me were two or three girls walking in the middle of the road, talking. They only realized I was there when I sounded the horn and seemed really surprised, judging by their jumpiness.

If someone walking in front of the bike can't hear that noise, I really don't see how someone inside a sound-insulated box, in a generally noisy environment, probably blasting the radio, is going to notice the loud pipe.

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Most people are either blissfully unaware of their surroundings regardless of the noises or they just tuned out said noises because there are so many of them.

This is not an argument for noisier exhausts. It's an argument to reduce noise in general, from all sources. Then people will react better to the louder noises.

Agreed, ban headphones while walking down the street!

Please turn your vehicle in to the authorities to be cubed immediately.

Yeah that is dumb, I agree. It's asking to be hit on the roads.

I know you're being facetious and it would obviously be silly to ban them. That said wearing headphones/earphones while walking around a city, for me, would reduce my situational awareness to a degree I would absolutely not be comfortable with. I know plenty of people are comfortable doing so but, while drivers and road design almost certainly bear the lion's share of the blame for pedestrian injuries and fatalities, distracted pedestrians don't help themselves. (Just the other week, I saw a person come super-close to getting hit in a parking lot as they were obliviously walking across the traffic lane buried deep in their phone.)

I once saw a pedestrian step out in front a speeding police car with lights and siren . . . I guess because the walk light turned green? The police car had to slam on its brakes and honk before the idiot noticed it.

> Most people are either blissfully unaware of their surroundings

Maybe it’s my morbid search history, but I still look on in awe as people cross the intersection in front of me while deep on their phones. They don’t look up to check at all - not even at the start!

Yeah same, it boggles my mind. I'm scared for my life of busy intersections, many drivers get impatient to the point of seemingly not caring if they'll kill you. I never ever look at my phone while on the move.

I still think it's "bullpucky" and two or three clueless pedestrians don't demonstrate anything.

When living in a neighborhood where almost all of the houses were old and poorly insulated, the motorcycles which went up and down our street were loud enough that indoors, with the windows closed, we would have to stop conversations, pause tv shows, etc, and wait for them to pass, because one simply couldn't hear anything over them. This is a densely populated neighborhood; 4-8 apartments per building tens of buildings per side per block, so interrupting hundreds of people per block, and many thousands in the course of a ride seems a reasonable estimate. The motorcyclists would joyride in loops, so you would hear them multiple times, being disrupted each time. I think for this reason the disruption caused per ride is comparable to a streaker on the field of a major sports event that forces game play to be paused. For someone who disrupts whole neighborhoods in this way, on regular basis, to say it's "for safety" seems like a narcissistic delusion. If I drive a car on the highway, and there are large trucks with big blindspots and drivers who I know are struggling after having been at it for 12h, should I have a siren to make sure they know I'm there?

I must hasten to add that cyclists and pedestrians also have to deal with drivers in massive metal deathboxes, and we do it without disrupting the whole world around us.

Or if they were like me, they were trying to ignore the loud sound damaging their ears that 99.999% is a vehicle nowhere near them.

Exactly. As far as I've been able to tell, mere noise will do absolutely nothing to get most drivers' attention. I've seen drivers fail to notice a police car or other emergency vehicle behind them, siren and lights both on, as they stare fixedly at the phone in their lap. Even in less extreme cases, most drivers will just treat loud motorcycle noise as part of the general din of being in a place where they exist. It won't generally have any effect at all on their decisions to speed up, slow down, or change lanes. Fun fact: the more common a noise is, the less likely it becomes that it will have any effect at all on people's behavior.

If the only way for a vehicle to be operated safely is for it to be incredibly loud, then how about we ban them from urban areas or perhaps in general?

Doing dangerous stuff is cool. All the coolest bikers stealth their bikes. Put on extra silent exhausts. Dress in all black. Dim their lights. Hide in the blind spots of other cars.

Hire some people to put that on TikTok, and it's problem solved.

Ban cars because loud noises are required to make them not kill people? Good idea.

They are banned in many major European and Asian cities for a good reason

At the low frequencies that tend to dominate and at that volume, it's relatively difficult to figure out where the source of the sound actually is, especially with buildings around that reflect sound every which way

It was a one-way street, so it was pretty clear where the traffic was coming from.

I do not think that matters much.

I don’t think your brain learned about one way streets and started fully trusting drivers to follow the law, certainly not the low-level parts that govern the “there’s something there you may need to pay attention to” mechanism.

What do you mean?

I usually am aware that I'm in the middle of the street when I'm not supposed to be there (think when there's something blocking the sidewalk or similar). In this case, I'll absolutely pay a lot of attention to my surroundings. Hell, even when I cross the street at a green light, I'll look before I step off the sidewalk.

Because in my mental model of traffic, drivers are very likely to not follow the law.

I may very well be in the right and the guy running me over may very well be certain to get convicted, but what good does that do to me if my legs are broken or worse?

I think it's the same thing with the new electric cars, which have to make a noise because people can't hear them coming otherwise. This, to me, means that pedestrians are expected to pay at least some attention to their surroundings. Which, of course, doesn't mean you should run them over or otherwise put them at risk if they're careless.

But my overarching point is that enough people don't pay attention even when they are expected to, and no amount of noise is going to change that.

> Because in my mental model of traffic, drivers are very likely to not follow the law.

You are actually agreeing with your parent poster here. What you said is exactly why people look both ways even on a one-way street.

I think the point, consistent with the original story, is that most people don't look either way when crossing the street.

Behold, the dialectic of the material conception of the human mind. In my mind it bears an uncanny resemblance to the liquid humours posited by our forefathers, no?

Deaf people exist. And there are going to be people in the middle of the road from time to time; it happens. And sometimes people make mistakes. I’ve even seen people not realize that a street was one way. And sound reflects and bounces, and vehicles are capable of moving at different speeds; they’re even capable of moving the wrong way or on adjacent roads or on cross roads or on fields, making the determination of location not always straightforward. And any factors that did or did not apply in your story may apply in others. Just all the more reason for drivers to be careful.

> It was a one-way street

I don't think pedestrians are generally aware if a street is one-way or not.

Even louder pipes with high frequency noise should help with directionality /s

My bike came with a Yoshimura and it is deafening to me even on a 372cc. I had to buy a baffle for it and wear earplugs. My watch warns me it’s still 90 to 100 dB.

I guess it kinda sounds cool for about a minute before being unhealthy. It was a surprise to me that anyone want such a thing when I first started out.

It's an absolutely delusional argument imo. I think SciShow did an episode on it, but drivers can not hear motorcycles until they're right next to them, and I believe it has to do with how sound travels.

The sound on those bikes are directed almost entirely backwards. Which is why you can hear a Harley that blows by you until they get 2 miles ahead, but that same bike is essentially silent while it’s closing on you from behind. It’s a stupid argument.

Pipes point backwards. They still don't make enough noise to be heard from in front. That's why loud bikes always scare people, you don't hear them coming until they are next to you and blasting past you. It's silence and then deafening roar.

Loud pipes save lives is bullshit. Defensive riding, good safety gear, and staying out of blind spots saves lives.

I've noticed the same on my motorcycle. The pipe points out the back.

Or they were just blocking your way.

Whenever I hear a douche nozzle with an extremely loud exhaust, I start crossing / walking obnoxiously slow. Two can play the game.

It was a legal, unmodified exhaust. It was loud, but not "extremely" so. Also, they were not crossing, they were walking down the middle of the street. You know, where cars are supposed to go. People walk on sidewalks.

This was a Paris street, with two large sidewalks on either side of a narrowish one-way street. It's not like they had no other practical choice.

"Legal" is an arbitrary metric likely formulated in concert with the car/bike manufacturers via corrup... excuse me, via lobbying, so you should really know better than to use that term as a shield.

Do you not agree that noise pollution is a real problem that has grown to unacceptable levels?

Expect even more civil disobedience -- I've observed the same as you in my city, people started doing it on purpose to sabotage cars and bikes taking way too much space on iconic scenic streets.

I do agree. It's one of the reasons why I've sold that bike several years ago.

But I very much doubt this was done on purpose. This was not an "iconic" street by any means, just a random street of no particular interest, with close to no traffic, pedestrian or vehicle. Such "iconic" streets do exist, and they usually have specific road rules where people are allowed to walk in the middle of street and cars are expected to avoid them (the streets) as much as possible. This was no such street.

Plus, they were already walking down the middle of the road much before I was close to them. I've also seen other people do the same even with no vehicle in sight, in this or other similar streets. This is also a problem for bicycles, which also have to ride in the street and aren't exactly a source of annoying noise.

They were in Paris! This changes everything. Of course they were walking in the middle of the street.

Plus, Paris or not, with no setback for the buildings nobody wants to risk getting leftover washing liquid poured on them from a window.

> Plus, Paris or not, with no setback for the buildings nobody wants to risk getting leftover washing liquid poured on them from a window.

Wtf, this is not backwater Russia we're talking about (aka the places where the Russian units originated that were caught looting washing machines). I've never seen someone be as intentionally rude as to dump out water from a window.

I sort of see it all the time in Paris. I almost got dumped on a couple of weeks ago when walking my children. If we had been five seconds earlier, we would have been soaked.

(I say "sort of" because I assume it's generally people watering plants, but the amount of water coming down seems excessive.)

But surely you are aware that Paris has many visitors.

And that a good portion of them may be paranoid about this type of thing due to their very real experiences elsewhere.

People are conditioned to ignore the droning sound of exhaust. It's ubiquitous and also not very directional. Horns, on the other hand, usually work to get peoples attention.

Have you considered maybe you're in the wrong? The hierarchy of responsibility puts a motorbike above (more responsible) than a pedestrian. Three people is more than one, so you are really saying you inconvenienced three more vulnerable people just so you, a single person, could go down a road, at speed, without a care for others.

That why I always drive on the sidewalk. It’s the courteous thing to do.

I wasn't racing down the street, if that's what you're saying. And, at least in these parts, pedestrians aren't supposed to walk in the middle of the street if there are sidewalks available (outside certain designated areas, of which this street was not one).

Many a street has been converted to such an area. But rules apply to everybody, and sometimes even an obnoxious biker can actually be in the right.

That's why I wear a car alarm strapped to my head, always going off, when I walk down the street.

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