The Scourge of Airport Noise
askthepilot.com
askthepilot.com
Or all the texts I get about remindeds of appointments followed by asking for reviews.
It's like every channel is being abused to get us to do something. And I fail to pick out the important ones.
Side note, with people wanting more dense housing, noise levels will go up.
I slept in quieter neighborhoods but they were still dense.
No, but I suspect that time that you would be in a queue anyway where they can get you to do work to select the right script for the person you eventually get connected to have loaded is time that they can shave off the actual connected time on the call, letting them serve more customers per unit time with the same number of staff members and making the user experience for using the telephone less pleasant so anyone who can manage it (even if they would generally prefer telephone otherwise) and has a problem where it is possible will avail themselves of self-service solutions via the website rather than calling at all.
It's surprising how much a bit of distance helps too. Just a street back from a stroad and you're already much better off sound wise. We don't have to abandon roads just be smarter with where we put faster roads (50kmph+ is probably not what people think of as fast but I find that is when noise is at unpleasant levels to those on the street. As well, it's tires not exhaust noise causing the majority of noise)
There are probably people reading this who like me thought nothing of road noise, no big deal, just a fact of life. But spaces are so much nicer without rushing cars on the majority of thoroughfares.
I chose this house, I’m not complaining, but I would enjoy a world with less to zero cars.
Next!
Next!
The noisiest vehicles in the centre of Copenhagen seem to be diesel delivery vans, so it's a decent improvement as these are swapped for electric ones.
Slowly driven electric cars are slightly quieter than slowly driven petrol/diesel cars, but the greater improvement is the slowly driven vans, trucks, refuse lorries and so on.
(Especially the electric refuse lorries! No more loud diesel thing emptying bins at silly-in-the-morning.)
Which is precisely why their traffic composition is different than that of American cities. I absolutely believe that the lowest-hanging fruit in many of Copenhagen’s streets are diesel delivery trucks. I do not believe that American cities have adopted the kind of forward-thinking policies that would have reduced other sources of traffic noise to the point where those are the largest contributors.
Tire noise is negligible at very low speeds, but diesel engines are noisy. So in a dense city, you notice the noisy trucks with their clacking engines. In an American city, vehicles are whizzing by at 100+kph on multi-lane roads or highways, so you hear tire noise, even from a distance.
Making all the cars in America electric isn't going to do anything about highway noise. But making all the trucks in Tokyo electric would really make the roads here a lot quieter (and they're already pretty quiet, it just depends on where you go; places with lots of stores need trucks, whereas neighborhoods don't).
There are definitely advantages to living in a condo or apartment, but the reality is that living in close proximity to a bunch of other people is going to be noisier. New condos tend to be better, but impact noise in particular still carries to adjacent units. Same with noise carrying from common areas like hallways.
The issue is that people don't care about the noise on the street nearly as much as they do about the noise inside their dwelling. And car noise doesn't make it inside the houses while people noise does, and, with the dense housing, often originated in the same building. And a microphone outside an apartment complex will indeed fail to record e.g. a fitness enthusiast on top of your bedroom setting an emergency lifting reps record at 3:30 am.
I live in a college town, but I do not live in a college community. As such, the city has rather strict and extensive ordinances against noise, such as that generated by parties. Therefore, both the landlady and law enforcement are on our side if we ever have trouble with noisy neighbors.
I don't know how it is in other cities. I've heard from friends who lived in Manhattan that sometimes the noise was intolerable, but nothing could be done about it. Perhaps if neighbors don't care about neighbors, that's what happens. We have yet to progress to such anarchy around here, fortunately.
Oh really? I’m sitting inside my apartment listening to car noise right now. Our apartment sits away from the street too, probably 150ft away.
Window open, about 4m away from it at my desk, noise level is 45-55dB.
Window closed, 25-27dB.
Almost all of it is car noise.
In any case, yes - it's relatively dense and car noise is very high. When I closed the window I could finally hear my tinnitus against the backdrop of near silence. I didn't realise how much the street noise was affecting me either, even though it was constant.
That's your problem right there. I figure if I opened the window on the opposite side of the house and there were no wind, birds and insects I could easily hear traffic too. The difference between this and having people behind your wall, floor and ceiling is that you can close the window whenever you want. You cannot do much with the neighbors.
I live in car-ridden Suburbia now. When my relatives from the dense city visit, they are blown away by the silence.
Maybe things are different in Japan, but everything is different in Japan.
Densification allows you to reduce car dependence, and most city noise is from cars.
But if you walk, bike, take transit, it gets better.
People don't automatically adapt just because you build it differently and people typically have trouble imagining genuinely living differently without actually experiencing it.
Speeds are way lower in dense neighborhoods, and no on street parking, so the noise is lower and it's a pain to pull your car in and out. Most noise is tire noise not exhaust (except your odd racer boy and their fart cannon exhaust)
Increased density means increased traffic, period. Has this equation been reduced by working at home? Sure. But it remains a fact of life.
It's America's problem of its own making, you need to find a solution, just shoving more lanes for cars, more suburbs with single detached homes, is not solving absolutely anything. No, not every rural small town will have Dutch-levels of access to trains but you can definitely improve the situation on the densely populated areas of the East and West coast, just have to get rid of this obnoxious and gauche car-addiction.
The longer you take to transition out of car-dependence, the more painful it will be.
Good luck on solving it, doesn't seem like American society put much value in it, you seem to like to suffer in traffic.
That's why the endless proselytizing about "Let's be Amsterdam!" is soooo tiresome. We're not fucking Amsterdam and never will be. I love Amsterdam, but it's just not applicable.
Also the vilification of houses is obnoxious and dumb. The USA is not "full." Some people actually want to DO things, like garden or have a workshop or a swing set or a kiln. That means they want a HOUSE, and guess what? It's a hell of a lot better than covering up every square foot of ground with concrete for high-density apartment blocks, preventing water from percolating into aquifers and intensifying the permanent drought that reigns over much of the west.
Not to mention the "heat islands" that endless densification creates, and the trees destroyed for it.
The endless bellyaching by fake liberals about "zoning" serves as a smokescreen for corruption: a handout to developers and a license to destroy already-residential areas, while giant dead malls with boarded up Macy's stores and vast concrete parking lots sit growing weeds. THOSE have already imposed costs on the environment and are already "high-density," so until every one of those is redeveloped (along with every defunct commercial or manufacturing zone) we should never be targeting neighborhoods with actual HOUSES.
Zoning is USEFUL. It allows people to choose the kind of neighborhood they want to live in. People who want density and walkability have downtown. People who want a house can choose neighborhoods zoned for houses. And some neighborhoods blend the two pretty effectively. But pretending that zoning is always a racist, elitist conspiracy is infantile at best and more often an excuse to destroy neighborhoods for someone else's profit.
Where do you think dead malls are, exactly? I live in an SFH neighborhood that's threatened by developer giveaways, and there is a boarded-up Macy's and defunct Fry's growing weeds within two miles. And, to the west, there are stretches of decrepit small-commercial/industrial tracts awaiting rejuvenation. But NOPE! Let's let developers replace one house with 10 FUCKING UNITS, with no permits or review.
So... you're wrong.
> Also the vilification of houses is obnoxious and dumb. The USA is not "full." Some people actually want to DO things, like garden or have a workshop or a swing set or a kiln. That means they want a HOUSE, and guess what? It's a hell of a lot better than covering up every square foot of ground with concrete for high-density apartment blocks, preventing water from percolating into aquifers and intensifying the permanent drought that reigns over much of the west.
It's not about being "full", it's about creating an urban environment that can enable humans to live without a car. The Netherlands has many suburbs with mixed SFH, some duplex buildings, rowhouses and so on. It creates denser packs of urbanisation that allow even small towns/settlements to share a downtown feeling with shops and local commerce while still providing housing for people who prefer to live in a SFH.
The issue with American suburbia is very similar to a monoculture plantation: instead of creating suburbs with a variety of different houses to accommodate differing levels of needs and incomes, which can sustain some kind of a local life (with local bars, restaurants, grocery stores) the US has zoned out most of that to only allow detached houses, creating pockets devoid of life except for individuals in their houses (like a monoculture, devoid of an ecosystem).
You don't need to get rid of SFH, you just need more mixed usage of the land, keep the SFH suburbs around a small center with denser housing which can support local shops on their ground level, like you said the US is not full, there's space to do it this way, it's just a matter of policy, not a law of Nature.
More is not always better when it comes to warnings, and is often worse.
If everything is a priority... then nothing is a priority.
I block notifs[1] from 99% of the programs on my phone because THEY. ARE. NOT. IMPORTANT.
The small handful of programs that do have notifications enabled are because they actually are worth my attention.
[1]: No, I refuse to properly call them notifications because notifs are not notifications. Notifications shouldn't be making me question if they are important, hence notif.
All very loud, and combined with a sound quality that reminds me of a 20 bucks portable radio makes for a miserable experience.
I vote for quiet airplanes in addition to quiet airports!
Not true for middle-class lounges such as Centurion, Priority Pass, and most airline lounges (Polaris, Flagship, Senator, Singapore, etc).
Most go for food or drinks. The lounges are often crowded and loud with silverware, plates, kids, and TVs.
For elite lounges such as the Private Suite, Lufthansa and Emirates First Terminal, yes, quietness is a big selling point. But at this point, you’re on the vector to flying private domestically.
I was 45 minutes early, and the only soul in the waiting room. The TV was blaring and I tried sitting right under it so I wouldn't be distracted by it. But it was playing some reality show featuring young adults. They had some outing to a cemetery, and they were actively, constantly making crude sexual references, and then they started mocking and blaspheming the Catholic faith, (the faith of the native population being "served" by these predatory White colonist medical people) and joking about ghosts and séances and other garbage.
So, I went back to the front desk, and I simply politely asked if she could power off the television. She seemed perplexed by my request, like nobody asks that, but she didn't ask why, and she complied with my request, and I enjoyed some peace and quiet after that.
What made the United's business class lounge better than something like the first class terminal at FRA and directly being dropped off at your plane?
I’m not talking about Lufthansa’s Senator or business class lounges that anyone with Star Alliance Gold can access. Those are at the level of Delta Sky Clubs or the new 2023 United Clubs.
I’m talking about an entire private terminal with chauffeur service to the plane.
Most of those air cabin PA announcements are necessary to legally cover their asses. I doubt am airline would want to find out what happens in court if they didn't give those ps announcements.
In some airlines in Asia you get every announcement in three languages, and your IFE is interrupted by all of them, regardless of whether you understand just one. Even worse, they put short pauses between them, teasing you with a couple seconds of your movie before interrupting it again. A basic level of care would be to interrupt the IFE only for the language you had chosen for the IFE when you first sat down.
I can read enough of several languages to navigate the menus, choose a film and so on, but not enough to understand the safety briefing. Many people won't touch the IFE at all, especially before take off.
Though every time I travel by train in England, they seem to have added more pointless drivel to the railway station security announcement. ("This is a security announcement. Please do not leave baggage unattended anywhere on the station. Any unattended articles may be removed and destroyed by the security services. If you see anything suspicious, please tell a member of staff. Remember, see it, say it, sorted." Back when the IRA were actually leaving bombs around, we only needed the italic bit.)
It then become asshole design when they add 3 rings before that pause as if you finally are getting through! Evil phone system designers!
"We care about your privacy"
no. you. do. not.
Please don't pretend.
I almost feel bad for the attendants slowly walking down the aisle afterward sadly holding up the offer paperwork after the announcement while everyone sits there annoyed waiting to land.
"The pointlessness of this counsel needs no elaboration."
California is the epicenter of this BS. They actually have announcements called "sigalerts" and "red flag warnings." The incontrovertible failure of those names is inherent in their meaninglessness.