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Comment by darkamaul | Hacker News Reader

We tolerate way too much noise in our daily lives, especially in dense cities. It’s a hidden tax on our health. Constant low-level noise has been linked to stress, sleep disruption, and even cardiovascular issues.

What bothers me is that we only regulate the loudest offenders (cars, motorcycles, construction), while the residual of everything else is just accepted as background. But that background adds up.

I wish we had stricter regulations not only for peak noise but also for the residual noise emitted by everyday objects. If reducing a few decibels here and there became a design goal across the board, the cumulative effect on quality of life in cities would be enormous.

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Some years ago I had my first panic attack at work. Walking home was an atrocity; and since then I'm much more aware of how noisy a city can be.

Now I have a kid I often walk around. You're even more sensitive to city noises when you're desperately trying to keep your baby asleep!

The two big offenders where we live are a) drunk students partying outside; b) motorcycles (which are somehow allowed to be this noisy?). It's a pedestrian-focused city mostly car-free, but motorcycles and young drunkards more than compensate.

Another source of annoyance are the beeps and boops that every household appliance thinks they need to have. The microwave's song when it finishes, the water boiler's super loud beep, the washing machine's stupid jingle at start and end of a cycle, etc.

Going to Shanghai (FFC) and seeing a bus driver flashing headlights instead of honking at a green light laggard was eye opening. All the electric cars and mopeds too of course.

Coming back to NYC afterwards was wild. The fucking food stand generators. AC vents. The cars. The buses.

I live out in the country now where it is nice and quiet but when I was in grad school I worked for a summer in NYC and had an apartment in midtown. One of the many delights was having an apartment whose sole window opened into an interior courtyard that was maybe 10’ wide x 10’ long. Despite the fact that it did not directly open to the street, the noise from the window was so intense that I basically never opened it.

I eventually came to appreciate that the noise level (and god, trash odors) were tolerable as long as you either never went outside, or you limited your exposure to the few modestly quiet places or times in the city. Weekend noise level could be pleasant at times but holy Christ… do the sirens ever stop?!!!

This is why I wear earplugs when I commute on the NYC subway which is notoriously loud. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2707461/

> I wish we had stricter regulations

By now HN should have a bot to automatically post the above quote in every new thread created, because someone will always make that comment.

There are very quiet places you can move to, so quiet that you can hear your own blood vessels.

Dealing with a constant level of background noise should not be a mandatory fee to participate in society, particularly when there are very clear ways to drastically reduce that background noise (examples already listed in this thread).

"Just move" is never a good suggestion when someone has real grievances with how their society is working.

In cities - where we have a great number of other people around us - we have to accept the noise level which the majority deems tolerable. Most of the noise is from buses and lorries, which we cannot take away unless we want to make life impossible in the cities. But nobody disagrees that excessive noise is intolerable, such as modified motorcycle exhausts, loud parties in a residential building etc.

So I think in this case "just move" is appropriate advice. Or are you going to kick the asses of each and every person who lives in your city until you get your will through?

Yet you participate in society! Curious.

One persons "improvement of society" may be the opposite for another person. And if you share a small space (a city) with a lot of other people, you have to take that into account. Our physical world isn't the Arch Linux terminal, where a hacker is omnipotent and everything bends to his will. We have to take other people into consideration. And then the goal of reducing noise levels start to interfere with other important things, such as public transport, goods delivery, the ability for people to work, etc.

Yeah, people can just be dickheads too.

There seems to be zero consequence for ruining the environment currently.

If you're happy with that, you do you.

I'd rather if something was done about the "elective" noises that we have around, like ridiculously loud leaf blowers, pointlessly loud motorbikes and cars, etc.

I don't think it's fair to say, "just uproot your entire life and move somewhere else" because people are being dickheads.

We don't even do a good enough job at regulating peak noise. There are asshats who have anti theft alarms on their cars that go off for what feels like hours and they don't stop by to check on their cars. Also there are idiots who deliberately destroy the silencers or mufflers on their bikes. I think these things are a higher priority.

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