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Very true. One of the remarkable things about Dutch cities is how quiet they are. Sometimes I step outside and just hear nothing and it's almost unsettling. Never experienced that in cities at home in Ireland were cars dominante, even in cities less than half the size.

In Switzerland I believe they have a noise ordinance on Sundays - no loud noises, incl. especially things like lawn mowers allowed on Sundays.

Unfortunately that’s a social problem that one person can’t solve alone. Here in Brazil it seems to be a common problem that individuals looking for attention will modify their motorbikes to be extremely loud and I’ve never seen this kind of thing getting much outrage from other people. They treat it as normal and police seem to have more pressing things to worry about.

In Paris they added automatically ticketing noise/detecting cameras.

It’s a matter of people wanting it.

Really? How does that work if two motorcycles go by in parallel and only one is "extra-loud"?

I guess it can use the time delay between two different microphones to figure out the direction.

And I guess if it can’t be sure it won’t ticket.

Just because there are bigger problems, it doesn't mean there isn't demand to solve smaller ones.

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.

> 99% of noise is cars and motorbikes.

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.

> 99% of noise is cars and motorbikes.

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.

These are all valid points, I also very annoyed at noisy home appliances (fridges...), but I'm always shocked by how loud it is as soon as you step outside. I remember during the first lockdown I would take walks out in Paris and it was so quiet and peaceful; the sheer quantity of decibels originating from motorized vehicles is insane.

I also like fresh air, though.

Happy for you, most houses I visited in Canada are so poorly insulated (noise and temperatures) that it's laughable and triple glased windows would just move the problem from windows to walls.

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

Cars aren't the sort of noise that I primarily care about. Neighbors with their god-awful dogs and children that scream and hit the walls 24/7 are far worse.

> 99% of noise is cars and motorbikes

See Not Just Bikes' "Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

> 99% of noise is cars and motorbikes

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.

Tell your family to stop motorbiking to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Bam, problem solved.

Already exists, same as is used for any other soundproofing. Rockwool insulation, resilient channels and a second layer of drywall, mass loaded vinyl, acoustic panels and tapestries (can hide some more mass loaded vinyl in there too), acoustic adhesive, scored screws to kill floor squeaks. They're all quite expensive but hey! Very DIY accessible.

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.

Curtains add a flexibility to the use of space that walls do not. If I only have overnight guests very occasionally, I don't want to wall in part of my living room to accommodate them, but I'd love to be able to hang a curtain from some removable hooks that would give them some real noise privacy.

Go countryside, they said, it'll be quiet.

Except for: tractors, harvesters, mopeds, quadbikes, chainsaws, circular saws, nailguns, lawnmowers, leafblowers, snowblowers, diesel generators, motorboats, skijets, snowmobiles.

This.

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, …

Where I am right now 99% of the noise is coming from animals. The birds are non stop dawn til dusk and there is currently a dog barking...

Same here. Loudest noise is one of my servers, but after that is birds and cicadas. I wish I could make the birds shut the hell up, but that sounds like the start of a horror movie.

> Force the use of quiet tyres on the road

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

When you buy tyres they actually come with a dB rating, at least in the EU. See: https://www.protyre.co.uk/car-help-advice/tyre-selection/wha...

Tires for my car range from 67 to 72db, which isn’t much of a range

> Personally I think we need to put cars underground

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.

> 99% of noise is cars and motorbikes

EVs are incredibly quiet. (but yes they still honk)

Only at very low speeds, past 30km/h (18mph) the noise from the tyres starts to approach or surpass the noise from the engine so they're nearly equivalent.

Yes, but then there are few idiots with modified cars (or most motorbikes in general) that are orders of magnitudes louder and can be heard from kilometers away.

There are efforts to attack the car tyre noise problem by grinding groves into the surface of the road. it's called "Next Generation Concrete Surface" I remember hearing about it on the "Twenty Thousand Hertz" podcast [0] [0] https://www.20k.org/episodes/sonicutopia

We had grooved concrete here some decades ago. Luckily they got rid of those as the noise was much worse than normal surfaces.

EVs are now required to make a noise at low speeds and at high speeds tires dominate. The best option is fewer cars, the second best option is lower speed limits (with enforcement!).

The majority of noise is not from the ICE itself but from the noise of the tires on the pavement. EVs have the same issues as all other vehicles.

We live on a semi-main road. Normal engines aren’t really noticeable or annoying. Nearly all of the road noise is generated by tires with a fraction coming from large truck engines and vehicles with broken exhausts.

Tires are shockingly loud.

Smooth roads really help with this, but no one seems to care

Smooth roads come with grip problems - especially in the rain.