À quieter world would be life changing. It’s incredible how low tech we are in regard to sound.
I grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, an extremely noisy city mostly due to traffic: old vehicles, motorbikes with open exhausts, cars honking, noisy trucks passing by residential neighbourhoods, an airport inside the city (with take-off and landing ramps over major residential neighbourhoods, including one I lived at), etc.
Moved to Sweden more than a decade ago and lived in very quiet places here, nowadays right in front of a forest with a couple of lakes nearby, and I simply cannot spend more than a few weeks back in São Paulo after getting used to the quietness. I feel much, much more stressed just existing there, even inside apartments on the 20th floor, even on the "quieter" parts of the city, it's a physical feeling that I do not shake off until I'm back home in Sweden.
One can get "used" to noisy environments but the difference it is to live in quieter areas is really hard to describe, I don't think I can tolerate living in noisy environments after seeing how life is on the other end of the spectrum...
Of course I still can tolerate the noise, since I still live here. I am used to it and, most of the times, I don’t consciously care. But I do appreciate and miss the quietness.
Whenever I got back to the city, I felt overwhelmed.
I ended up living in the city and getting used to the noise again. I made the conscious decision to do so because I felt like I limited myself a lot in the places that were acceptable.
Comfort is it's own prison.
I wonder, though, if there is some kind of gain I miss out on by getting used to discomfort.
Natural noises have a rhythm that doesn’t stress us out and wake us. Methodical.
A busy road can mostly start to blend into white noise. Unless it’s absolute sociopaths honking in residential neighborhoods.
Suburbs though have leaf blowers that your asshole neighbor uses 2 hours before it’s legal to use it.
That noise is inconsistent, and it is the worst sound. Some people just suck though.
Florida. Key West. Protected bird species. The parking lot roosters. Nothing methodical about them.
I've been around a few suburbs in the USA and they aren't quiet to my ears, they sound dead for a lack of a better word. Dead with the odd noise from a car's engine and tyres (usually a pickup truck), lawn mower, leaf blower rushing through it.
Absolute silence is not even natural, it gives me the creeps when I'm in a deafening silent ambient.
Even to this day, one of my best memory of that place is the quietness I could experience by sitting at wheeling chair in the front of the house and the only sound you’d hear would be the wind, birds and sometimes chickens nearby.
Nowadays it isn’t the same sadly, because the city grew enough turn the road at the front much more busy. Now there’s a motorbike or truck passing by every 2 minutes, which spoils the whole experience.
Having less personal space, privacy, nature, etc. are trade-offs for what a city provides if you are into city life. I don't live far away from the city centre but have nature around, depending where you live on Earth it's not mutually exclusive to have access to both.
So the issue is noise, the rest are trade-offs one can make but I'd venture to say that almost absolutely no one would choose "noisy environment" as a preference for their lifestyle.
It's easy from a technical standpoint but practically impossible from a human one. The vast majority of people simply don't notice or care that some large percentage of vehicles are intentionally modified to be louder than the legal maximum. Police won't enforce it, and most citizens barely register the noise as present, much less a problem.
Banning ICE vehicles altogether may very well be the only thing that actually gets the problem solved, since that actually has more momentum behind it than enforcement of existing noise regulations does.
If 5% of those are overly loud, that's an average of a very loud noise every 3 seconds, and most of them will take somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds to come and finally go away. If you don't think that's large, we have very different noise thresholds.
The hard numbers I'm aware of are about motorcycles, which have much higher rates of illegal modifications than other vehicles. This source documents a bunch of other sources, with estimates ranging from 40-70%:
When Harley-Davidson and other moppet/scooters would be all electric, that would be quitter.
Not that easy, the electric Harley is intentionally louder than the combustion version - because people want them loud.
(I am not a fan of banning in general, but banning noise is fine by me)
You cannot even hear modern ICE cars running unless you are really close to them. My neighbor's garage door opener is louder than his ICE car...
Road noise is tires/air like you mentioned. Not a real way to deal with that.
They are extremely loud, second only to no muffler cars and sport bikes blasting through deserted back roads.
If you live in the woods with trees, they'll sound as loud as the ocean. If you live near the ocean, well that's always loud.
The biggest offenders are:
1. cars/trucks 2. birds 3. airplanes 4. ac units 5. ocean 6. wind with trees
You'd never know trees sound like the ocean if you aren't around trees. Trains are loud but intermittent. And trains don't run very often anymore where I am.
GP is very right. To this day, I know that if I don't go to sleep until ~03:30, I might just as well stay up - when the birds wake and start making noise, I won't be able to sleep at all. Cars, trams, trains, I can tune out. There's something about bird chirps that makes them impossible for my brain to ignore. It's worse than loud snoring.
Unrelated. To the noise but just as obnoxious, They also seem to get a pervasive joy in cutting town in half by parking their trains in the main line running through the middle of the town lengthwise. I understand the rail line was here first and the town grew up along the length of the track, but why they cant park their train on the miles of empty straight track outside of town. It boggles my mind.
We don't even need to do anything radical like getting rid of cars. They can be quiet. Just ban loud vehicles. Force the use of quiet tyres on the road. Do not allow modifications that remove silencers etc. to be used on the road. Race tracks already implement a SPL test for cars at the exhaust. It would be dead easy to implement this for road cars. Already you've probably eliminated the need for anything high-tech for most people.
Then, for the next level, we need to keep driving cars out of our living spaces. Considering the bicycle exists, there is no need for people to transport their bodies from the outside of town to the inside at an average speed of less than 15mph[0]. It's insane.
[0] https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...
If you live in the city, sure. But 99% of the noise I deal with is family members going about their lives. Would love a solution to help prevent sound transfer indoors, so that I can focus (and sleep) better.
For exterior noise the biggest bang for the buck is replacing windows. I had some soundproof windows put onto my previous house and you could close the door on a parade going by and not even know it was happening.
Except for: tractors, harvesters, mopeds, quadbikes, chainsaws, circular saws, nailguns, lawnmowers, leafblowers, snowblowers, diesel generators, motorboats, skijets, snowmobiles.
I moved to a countryside 2 years ago, escaping from city noise. Now, I’m going back (although to the outer, more quiet side of the city) because I’m going mad - lawnmowers, dogs, tractors, diesel generators, dogs, dogs, lawnmowers, dogs, …
EVs are incredibly quiet. (but yes they still honk)
Tires are shockingly loud.
It’s a matter of people wanting it.
And I guess if it can’t be sure it won’t ticket.
For example, most of the churches where I live have a big meeting room underneath their main worship space. This room has curtains to divide it into smaller spaces for a dozen or more different meetings, including Sunday school, where a dozen (often noisy) children might be in each room.
Having curtains that genuinely reduce the noise between the areas would make a huge difference! It would reduce the demand to build new buildings with separate walled rooms that wouldn't be used most of the time.
Adding flexibility of use to larger spaces with a variety of demands is a problem worth solving, even if it's not as big of a problem as motor vehicle noise in large cities.
I live atm in a place not too far from an airport: I see planes at a distance several times a day, big ones.
I cannot hear them: triple-glazed windows everywhere in the apartment. It works.
I hate noise: since forever I assemble (or have the shop assemble for me) PCs that are extremely quiet. Otherwise I will hear it. AMD 7700X CPU in "eco" mode (in the BIOS) and Noctua cooler/fan, Be Quiet! PSU, Be Quiet! tower. No GPU besides the CPU's iGPU (so it's fanless). I cannot hear that thing.
Then I love music. I'll hear that one loose bolt that did detach and is now vibrating in the system ceiling when I listen to music.
Noisy fridge, fans (there's one in one of the toilet), this or that device humming: there are many source of noise inside your place that can be really annoying when your place is quiet.
Besides the triple-glazed windows, the (small) building is well built: no common walls with neighbors on the same floor (it's the stairs and elevator that do separate the apartments). Only 8 apartments. Very smart architecture. Ultra quiet.
> The correct approach is not to invent some high-tech workaround but to go after the source of the problem.
You've never tried a place with properly installed triple-glazed windows: you'll be surprised. I'm not saying cars shouldn't be less noisy but making your living place quieter ain't that complicated: (quality and properly installed) triple-glazed windows and call it a day.
Asked a home building company if they build with concrete (not that you couldn't insulate a wood construction though) and they scoffed saying it would take 15 years to recoup the costs through energy savings... Which doesn't sound that long to me, it's a house not a car
Could you expand on this? Above 20-30mph tire noise is the dominant noise from vehicles [1] and I haven't yet found a reference that shows significant reduction by choice of tires
Personally I think we need to put cars underground - without tunnels we'll be in traffic hell forever[2]. And imagine the quiet.
[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pavement/sustainability/articles/ti...
[2] Elon Musk
Nope, unless drivers foot the bill entirely. Tunnels are horrendously expensive to build and maintain. Projects like Boston's Big Dig cost billions of dollars, went over budget, and move a smaller number of people than a proper subway train system.
> without tunnels we'll be in traffic hell forever
Also nope. Adding more lanes just induces more traffic demand. We will never solve traffic by building more car infrastructure. We can only solve traffic indirectly - by mixing residential and commercial building, by making streets safe to walk and bike, and by building a world-class mass-transit system.
It depends on where you live. My apartment building is older, built before acoustic norms came into effect. I can hear my neighbor two floors up wake up in the middle of the night to take a pee.
I have 0 issues with traffic or other city noise, even though I like having my windows open and live in Paris, one of the densest cities in the world.
See Not Just Bikes' "Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
Recently: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/air-pol...
Dyson fans are meant to be quieter, but for a premium.