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Comment by warrenmiller | Hacker News Reader

This is wonderful. remember : Cities aren't noisy, Cars are noisy.

Also, sirens are noisy and nobody even talks about regulating them adequately

In the UK, hearing a siren is exceptionally rare. AFAICT, they overwhelmingly prefer lights only, saving sirens for a narrow set of circumstances.

Same in NL. Sirens are only turned on in the most extreme cases. In most cases lights seem to be enough. I do get the impression that firefighters are a bit more likely to use sirens than police and ambulance are, but I'm fine with that.

this is absolutely not the case in Amsterdam. 90% of ambulances/firefighter cars have their sirens on full blast. this is especially noticeable in summer nights when they can be heard from quite far away

Except in London, where hearing a siren is so common people (other than drivers) don't react.

Sirens are _necessary_; being noisy is the point. Probably not a huge amount you can do there (beyond enforcing that they are only used where appropriate, but in most well-run emergency services that's largely not an issue). Anecdotally, living in a medium-sized (~1.5 million people) city, I don't hear them that much, except when walking along a road near my house that leads to a major hospital.

Pure-tone sirens are necessarily noisy; a while back there was an attempt to replace them with alternating white noise and a more normal siren sound, the reasoning being that sirens only needed to be so loud because they were serving two different goals at the same time, to identify the existence and location of an emergency vehicle, and that white noise could be played at a much lower volume while making it easier to locate the vehicle relative to your own.

Also anecdotally: I live on a busy cross-roads in Berlin, and I've had half a dozen so far today… and one more while writing this line. The exact number varies a lot from one day to the next, so I'm not sure the overall count, but the new one is still going on by the time I get to this word ← here even though the road was fairly clear at the moment.

Sometimes I even get them in stereo as multiple vehicles go past with a gap between them; and I've witnessed at least one occasion where different services passed the junction in different directions within a few seconds of each other.

The sirens are the only bit about this place that I really dislike; but enough of a problem that I'm looking for a suburban place next even though that will probably mean a longer walk to shops and restaurants.

Of course they are necessary. They have to be used responsibly and not as a job perk, that's my point. Light signals are usually enough.

I also live in 1.5 mil city and I haven't got used to how many there are after moving here almost a decade ago.

Cities arent noisy?? where do you live lucky mate? I feel you guys live in an echo chamber full of avocado toasts and cappuccinos. Cities are crowded places full of noise pollution produced by humans being humans. Thats all. If people require silence go to the deep country. Next step, everybody shut the f... up to not bother the Karens.

"City" is a broad term, encompassing e.g. NYC, but also Amsterdam, with a population of a mere 900k. Most parts of Amsterdam are really pretty quiet when there are no/few/slow-driving cars.

Its so funny everybody is talking just about Amsterdam. Try this in Rome and then lets talk again. Guys, you´re forgetting cities are cultural places not robot factories. Cultural and existential differences are real and shouldn't be imposed by law just to recall quietness in a crowded place like a city in Europe where people live in the streets as a cultural thing. We´re constantly educating the population by law and not by the example and it´s to retrograde.

You're fighting shadows again. The human noise of people as in Rome is the kind of thing people are trying to optimize _for_, because there's an inherent tension between high speed cars and pavement cafes. Admittedly Rome has both, but not on the same streets.

Venice is in Italy. I have stood outside at night and basked in the relative silence.

Plenty of people living in the streets in Amsterdam as well (and that number is only rising as cars are made less prominent), but that "noise" is of a significantly different quality than car noise is.

When I said "pretty quiet", I didn't mean "completely silent", I just meant that it doesn't feel noisy.

(Though I don't recall anyone suggesting the law should be used to enforce people to be silent.)

Well, the article is about Amsterdam.

But Amsterdam also has plenty of noise that doesn't come from cars. Some bars and and similar venues can produce quite a lot of noise. You don't want to live upstairs from one of those if you're a light sleeper who goes to bed early. People living there also complain a lot about tourists in the red light districts.

But all of that noise is very local. The people living there know that this is an issue, but it's only an issue for people in the immediately vicinity. Of course tourist hotspots will be noisy, but cars go everywhere.

The amount of noise coming from car traffic is significant, and it's directly related to the speed of cars. The A10 ring road around Amsterdam is 100 km/h in most places, but the west ring goes straight through a very dense residential part of the city, and for that reason, it's I think the only snelweg in the country that's limited to 80 km/h. Which still produces a lot of noise, so it's also surrounded by massive sound barriers. Somehow we don't put those sound barriers around every cafe.

A single motorbike produces like 5x more noise than a crowd of people screaming and stomping.

The vast vast majority of noise comes from vehicles and power tools.

I’m literally sitting in the middle of a midsize German city right now. It’s a Monday morning and blissfully quiet.

What you’re describing sounds more like the Middle East or Asia to me.

My limited experience with cities in the Middle East and Asia is that the noise there also comes first and foremost from traffic, and those cities could also benefit from a less car-centric design.

Yes - bikes and people honking senselessly is incredibly noisy. In Asia, a lot of shops simply blast music in hopes of attracting customers (not sure how that works)

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