The Potent Pollution of Noise
noemamag.com
noemamag.com
I'm my area, all it would take is a cop to watch the main drag and start enforcing speed limits and state and local noise ordinances and it would stop. But they don't because they are not interested. In part because they or their children partake in the hobby of harassing people in their homes a mile and a half away. Another part is its easier to ticket people late for work because they won't run like the noise makers do.
A couple of reasons come to mind:
1. Cops in our area are super busy handling call associated with theft, drug abuse, mental illness and homelessness that i’m not surprised they are not interested in bringing more work upon themselves by initiating contact for a relatively minor (to the above) infraction.
2. A lot of cops are into hotrods and imho the most flagrant of noise making vehicles, Harleys.
https://www-adac-de.translate.goog/verkehr/recht/verkehrsvor...
Of course one issue with my plan is that it depends on the cooperation of the dispatched law enforcement officers. If they were to symphonize with the people committing the noise infractions they might simply refuse to punish them.
That said, for all these communities surviving on / leaching off of ticket revenues, I've wondered why they haven't gone after these noise rats. Or a private entity whose business is selling equipment/systems to law enforcement. Put detectors on squad cars, and sell them a calibration setup. Pass and/or enforce some local noise ordinances, and...Ka-chinge!
I've been tortured by neighborhood subwoofer dicks as well as straight pipe pricks. I'm sorry to be derogatory in tone, here, but those are the mildest words I can bring myself to use for them. A steady rush of tire noise or the like would be welcome by comparison.
I too have serious privacy concerns WRT modern technology. However, seeing as that ship has sailed, stick such systems, with license plate readers, around town, and go after the violators. Triangulation, running video, and repeat logging to confirm the specific offender.
In my county, ostensibly repeat offenders can escalate to having their vehicle impounded. Of course, in real life, nothing is done -- not even a ticket.
People should be given a bit a time to e.g. fix a damaged exhaust. But for those who choose to inflict their noise on others? Better to ruin their lives, than let them ruin ours.
(Can you tell the recent bout of warm weather had left me dealing with this in my neighborhood... :-/ Sorry for being a downer, here. But this is a real, significant stress, and one many friends share. One that is the result of another's willful, selfish choice.)
Other than that, New York City is apparently considering the introduction of noise-activated cameras: https://abc7ny.com/new-york-city-council-traffic-laws-noise-...
"Hi all, could anyone please advise how to tackle this situation. My neighbour are good people but their sons car are very loud. There is so much base that I feel the sound on my bed in night Time. Our little one is due in 3 months. I’m worried about this situation."
And one popular response: "Just the reality of people living their lives..."
What I find interesting is that despite the rise of social media and the endless social-shaming that it enables, obnoxious behaviour doesn't seem to carry the same stigma that it once did. Related to this seems to be the conflation of what is legal and what is ethical (i.e. if it isn't illegal it is fine).
When leaving at unsocial hours i’d do the same - roll down the road until I was away from the houses and then start the car.
Some people just have zero awareness or empathy for their impact on other people.
In Europe cars have to pass an annual technical inspection to renew their license. Every part on the car has to be homologated and they'll only homologate things that are within all safety/noise/etc regulation.
My sister's ex boyfriend had to remove his modded exhaust and reinstall the stock version every year before inspection. This is clearly annoying so most people wouldn't bother. It also comes with heavy fines should he ever get pulled over for speeding or street racing. Cops love to hand out additional "illegal car mods" tickets when they're annoyed.
Added bonus: This would also solve the American problem with lifted trucks and LED headlights. Unfortunately it would also make my motorcycle unregisterable (not the exhaust, other stuff like distance between indicators).
Every lane-splitter when I drive in Cali surprises me, and I'm shocked I haven't accidentally hit one.
I feel like this would be a very tough statement to agree with if you're anyone but a car driver. If you meant it only in opposition to the idea that it's exclusively the cause of motorcycle accidents, then I'd agree, but think it'd be a necessary qualifier.
I'd probably also disagree with the somewhat hyperbolic claim that bikers don't care about their safety simply because they're on a motorcycle. While motorcycles provide for a clear increase in risk, how much someone does about their safety is only limited by their vehicle choice in this context, not decided by it. Cars provide for their own parameters of safety, as do others, and in each case people make tradeoffs for different reasons. It would probably be equally silly for me to say that as a public transit rider, if someone cared about their safety, they just wouldn't drive at all, but I sometimes think it.
As in, if you drive a car for your commute, you're probably much more likely to die in a vehicle accident than I am as a pedestrian or train rider, compared to the difference between being a biker or a car driver, but that doesn't mean you're not going to try and maximize your safety within the bounds of deciding/having to drive to work.
No, I know they don't care. I literally researched this. I went to my local emergency medical service, I calculated a representative sample of all cases which led to an ambulance being dispatched, I painstakingly compiled statistics on thousands of cases. Among the results I obtained were the facts motorcyclists were about 2.5 times more likely to require an ambulance than car drivers and that they'd be in much worse shape when an ambulance got there. Sadly I didn't have any outcome data, the trail ends after the patient reaches the hospital. I know from personal and professional experience that they die or are permanently disabled a lot more often than car drivers though.
If you get onto such a death trap, you clearly don't give a shit about your own safety. Motorcycles are much cheaper than cars so sometimes people have no choice but to accept the risk. Or maybe they just like exercising their god given freedom, I can at least respect that as a motivation. Don't tell me they care about safety though. They don't. Especially not the people enthusiastic enough about bikes to modify the vehicle's exhaust because they like the sound.
Every single day I deal with people like that on the road. Truth is they'd die even more often were it not for drivers like me who literally accomodate them. I actually go out of my way to avoid killing these people. They do make it extra hard though. They do stupid shit like mistake my defensive driving for a gap they can squeeze through to get ahead in traffic. Every single day. I feel like I'm slowly losing my sanity. Once I had 4 motorcycles literally surround me in transit. One in front of me, one behind me, one passing me from my left and one passing me from my right, all at the same time. Literally boxed in. Steady as she goes. If I had done anything else, I'd have killed one of them.
But maybe we should take a few lanes out from a majority of roads and dedicate them to anything but cars.
However, as a rider myself, I do tend to agree. If I had a penny for every stupid shit I've seen a rider do, I could buy all the highways in my country.
One short way I like to put it, is that they trust way too much the other people on the road (cars or bikes!) to not do something stupid at the exact moment they themselves do something stupid. Like cutting people off, riding 2 inches behind the vehicle in the front, overtaking some car waiting for pedestrians to cross – you name it they've done it.
As someone riding fairly defensively, I'm actually quite bitter about all this. Those idiots give us a bad rep and the powers that be are attempting to take our joy away with stupid regulations that won't actually improve anything.
I'm not against motorcycles in general... safer (to others), smaller, more efficient transportation is great. Dedicated motorcycle lanes? Getting rid of cars?
I am. They should not be street legal. If that's impossible, then they should be violently taxed to recoup their public health costs.
That said, as a loud car driver, I can't stand people who map pops-and-bangs into their car or buy loud exhausts for loudness sake. It is lame, from an engineering standpoint.
Also those of us with loud, modified, high performance cars appreciate engineering. With this comes maps and exhaust valves to allow the car to be quieter at 3am.
Point is, we are not all the same. A ban would treat me as a criminal to punish the others.
Isn't this something we argue is bad all the time here? Such as surveillance of everyone as if they're criminals for the sake of crime reduction?
The situation with loud cars is more nuanced.
Nuance is easy to ignore when something irritates or annoys you personally.
I don't care about your performance car. Go to a racetrack if you want that. Get your loud car off public streets.
OPs view would ban my modifications, when I respect people's desire not to hear my car.
I'm saying don't tar everyone with the same brush. But sure, over simplify and catastrophise.
It's clear you didn't read my whole reply but chose the pitchfork instead.
I can't have reasoned discussion with that kind of dogmatic mindset.
I'm kind of joking, I consider gun-control advocates to be sincere, but tragically mistaken. I just figured your insane hyperbole deserved the same.
That said, I have no issue at all with loud cars existing, as long as nobody that's annoyed by them ever has to hear them. They shouldn't get a license plate for public roads though.
This is much like a trombone. Don't run the car loud off the highway, and things are fine. Don't play the trombone in the middle of the night. Simple.
Cars also have the tendency to sometimes go outside and move from place to place quite rapidly, creating the potential to wake or otherwise disturb thousands of people in a short timespan. Try that with a trombone!
It is the people, not the objects, which are the nuisance.
Because I appreciate not everyone wants to hear it.
OPs catch-all argument would ban my modifications.
It's a classic example of "I don't like X so let's ban it" without any rigor to examine or hear the various ways X isn't always ban worthy.
But empirically, I can see that building quiet ones that perform very well has been possible for many years now, so I consider intentionally buying a loud one and regularly using it anywhere other than on a racetrack sociopathic behavior.
But hey, let's not allow something like being uninformed stop us making broad statements and seeing the world as black-or-white.
I'm not saying loud exhausts are good all the time. I'm saying they shouldn't all be banned, because it isn't black/white.
My exhaust is perfectly quiet and within regulations off the track. The OPs argument would ban my perfectly polite modifications because they have the potential to be loud some of the time.
There's no nuance in the argument, or point to yours.
But you're right, there is no nuance in my argument. I'm so fucking sick and tired of being woken up 2:00 in the morning by my neighbors cars that this is something that I feel strongly about. And there's lots of others like me.
I'm with you.
My point is that banning all loud or modified exhausts isn't the right answer. There are false equivalences.
The upset is justified, I'm saying the extreme reaction to ban all modifications to exhausts is an overreaction.
I said mine _is_ loud when the valves are full open. Around the city, they're closed and it sounds factory.
My exhaust is modified. Valves open, it happens to be louder than factory. OP thinks this should be banned. I don't think loudness is a pre-requisite of power, it just so happens it is louder because "quiet" wasn't in the scope of requirements for the aftermarket downpipe and exhaust.
You're telling me what I should or shouldn't do while being willfully ignorant of what I was saying and showing a judgy narrow minded attitude. You're also projecting a lot of worst-case gap-filling there, which is often a sign of insecurity in ones own arguments. I won't accept value judgements over what is childish from you :)
So your car is loud despite a viable alternative existing that achieves the same outcome, performance-wise, while being quiet(er)?
Yeah, that should not be allowed on the streets/get a license plate. On the racetrack? Do whatever makes you happy! Just park it right there.
I do consider it possible that you personally might be responsible enough to have it perform quietly while you drive there and back, but too many people aren't. But in a world of always-responsible, always-rational people we wouldn't need gun laws either.
It sucks to be that responsible person in our non-ideal world, but I don't know a better solution that avoids massive collateral damage inflicted on people that couldn't care less about cars. If law enforcement were better about enforcing noise pollution laws I'd probably have a different view on this, fwiw.
If you have a car with a loud exhaust that can be silenced, keep it silent until you're out of public, like in a race track or your own private property in the middle of nowhere.
That said, self-regulating seldom works and enforcing this at the point of the infraction is very very hard.
The next best solution is to ban loud cars from driving in public spaces.
You're welcome to transport your loud car to the race track and use it there but use a quiet one for that.
When I grew up in a rural town in the midwest, it was quiet. Like we lived in a neighborhood full of houses, but it was silent almost all times of day except for nature sounds. There was occasional yardwork or a train going by. But neighbors driving around were drowned out by rustling trees it seemed, and I never noticed much traffic noises. When my wife visited for the first time, she was uncomfortable and almost in pain because of the silence, something I never expected.
But where I live now, it is constant cars. When I try to go out to park or out hiking, you hear the highway. The trails here are full of people and I have to listen to people talk my entire hike.
I live in a hilly area and leaf blowers seem to resonate through the hills. At 8am every day even on a Sunday, the golf course starts mowing which reverberates though the hills. There is no escape from man made noise.
Sometimes I miss greatly having any space within an hour or 2 that I can go and just listen to nature. It is a huge difference and a shrinking luxury.
It's like software, the hardest problem to solve isn't technical, it's people problems.
Noise gets treated differently then other types of pollution, exception being light.
You probably wouldn't get labeled a gentrifier, or really even get push back, if you wanted to clean plastic waste, put up garbage cans, recycle etc...
You'd be surprised haha
It’s incredible how effective that social media campaign was/is.
Moan about bad service from any company and you’re a “karen”, not a customer who rightfully demands good service, given the cost of things. Suddenly you’re not allowed to complain about anything and all employees are literal heroes on the same level as war veterans
A "Karen" is a particular type of complainer, one who's only aware of themself in their little bubble world, with insufficient regard or empathy for other human beings, or the external factors which sometimes make delivering A+ (or even decent) service infeasible.
The person on the other side might even agree with the complaint, but they usually don't have any power to do anything about it, and they're probably making minimum wage.
When stresses of work/life pile up, the inability to free myself from the unceasing car noise to find some tranquility can feel downright overwhelming at times.
The opposite is orders of magnitude more difficult and often prohibitively expensive (or impossible, when renting), especially given the poor noise proofing that most US buildings seem to have.
For all we know, it really is: It increases blood pressure [1], harms brain development [2], and causes cognitive impairment [3], just to name a few.
Of course not all noise is the same, and e.g. white noise can help mask both tinnitus and other, more stress-inducing noises (e.g. loud music, people yelling on the street etc. – personally, I sleep significantly better with a white noise machine masking city noises).
[1] https://www.acc.org/About-ACC/Press-Releases/2023/03/22/18/4...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
Yes, in a similar way to how nobody dies from a fall – it's always the abrupt landing that follows.
These reactions (blood pressure rising etc.) are largely involuntary, so why not prevent the cause if it's feasible?
This is my main qualm about noise. I use noise canceling headphones and it is not the same as having a quiet space or having no noise. It's not that I want silence, I want to listen to the world without man made sounds. Hear the trees, listen to the birds, etc. Nothing worse than going to the park and having one person sitting alone with their sonos turned up polluting the surroundings with noise and you can't "turn it off". your only option is to mask their noise with more noise of your choice by using headphones.
Totally agreed: I do have a lot of empathy for people playing music on a lawn in the park, but speakers on a trail etc. in nature are extremely annoying.
So its more so a gripe about a lack of power for us people who enjoy the peace. You can't "turn on" quiet like you can "turn on" music.