Agreed.
Unrelated pro-tip: wearing them while riding a motorcycle. Reduces fatigue and transforms a rough experience into almost luxurious. Highly recommended.
Please retract your comment and don't encourage such stupidity.
EDIT: Since this is being misinterpreted... Earplugs that deaden sound are fine and encouraged on a motorbike, playing music in your ears is what masks other sound and is both stupid and illegal.
Maybe it is your own misinterpretation as the parent never said they were playing music on them. You might not realize just how loud the wind noise is on a bike, you are not exactly hearing your surroundings music or not. Most if not all of your awareness on a motorcycle is coming from your eyes not ears, so hard to really say its stupid.
In any case, it's irrelevant - as far as I know, wearing headphones or earphones while driving a motorcycle is illegal whether or not you happen to be playing music in them, because how would anyone else know? If you get in an accident and get charged with distracted driving, that's on you. If you want earplugs, just wear them. They're much cheaper and more effective than sound cancelling headphones if you genuinely just want to block noise.
One risk is your focus going from what's on the road to what's coming into your ears.
This may have some useful mental aspects if you're doing a long-distance drudgery ride down Route 66 with nothing much happening in between pitstops, but it's another thing on I-5 or I-95 with all sorts of chaotic lane changes going on.
Even speaking with passengers has been shown to increase traffic incidents:
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13698...
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3141/1899-15
* https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
It's a debate spectrum / sliding scale on how society wants to go, but at the very least one should be aware of the risk factors and be mindful of where your attention is.
I am a bit stunned reading this.. Is this a common perspective of motorcyclists?
Like all things it does depend on where you ride and the general driving culture. In America that’s how I ride but in Vietnam it’s very different. Road rules are not as often followed and honking is common to make yourself known, usually while there I wear lower db reduction ear protection.
I am also not saying that there is zero opportunity to hear a horn but already on a motorcycle you have to have so much more awareness that I don’t find that sounds are all that helpful. It absolutely applies to driving a car too, after driving a motorcycle for a while I am as shocked as you just how unaware drivers are of their surroundings.
Keep in mind at around 35mph you can easily hit 85-90db from the wind. I do think ear protection actually helps identifying sounds but I still argue the hearing part is not that helpful.
I am not trying to say you have to follow my methods but folks calling for criminal punishment and shaming are a bit too far as the safety benefit from hearing is quite minimal depending on the driving culture.
No.
For example, every beginner-advice thread in /r/motorcycle has a highly-upvoted comment(s) recommending ear protection, including many folks stating they wish they had started using it earlier.
And even if it is conceded that sound may not save you from other vehicles, ear pro(tection) reduces the health risk of hearing loss that would effect other aspects of your life.
When you learn to ride a motorcycle you learn to look - look behind you when changing lanes, look in your mirrors, basically stay aware of whatever is happening at all times by looking. Because you're sure as hell not hearing a lot.
Cars are quieter, and hearing other vehicles is more likely. If anyone shouldn't listen to music, it's car drivers, not motorcyclists.
Not every deaf person is born that way, mate.
My eyes are my ears and you cannot rely on sound to know who or what might be coming up from behind you. Mirrors and head on a swivel are way more important.
I hoped electric cars would make for quieter cities, but instead they seem to make them worse, imo. All due to this noise making requirement. Then, at higher speeds, tire noise overtakes engine noise at a certain point, so the drivetrain becomes a moot point.
If I have the noise cancelling turned on, it would be downright unsafe.
While it is likely illegal in many places, it isn't everywhere and the safety risk depends on what sort of equipment you have.
Absolutely your choice not to wear hearing protection though. Eventually you will get naturally immune to it.
This is an incredibly dumb and dangerous attitude to hold and you need to rethink things if you've become so overconfident in your driving because you've raced or done "iron butts", whatever those are. Driving on real roads isn't like racing and you need to separate your attitudes and driving styles in each situation before your arrogance causes an accident. Remember that it's not just your life on the line but the other innocent people around you too.
As I said elsewhere, it depends on driving culture and where you are located in the world. It’s not a hard and fast rule. In America sound serves little safety though I can still hear car horns generally speaking with earpro on. In Vietnam because of the culture, organized chaos and usage of horns I will usually opt for low db ear protection. Semis will absolutely honk and run you over there. Since you consider a 500cc a beast I can generally pinpoint your location and understandable why you think like you do.
In both situations though, most of your safety is still from strong visual awareness.
Further, sound deadened cars with the stereo on an appreciable level also aren’t conducive to perceiving what’s around you.
Speaking as someone who commuted on 600 twins and 300 singles for years, if you’re wearing hearing protection and listening to some tunes and navigation hints you’re fine. Just ride defensively like you should, and make sure you’re not over doing it on the volume.
Let's be realistic - noise cancelling isn't a perfect technology. I rode with my AirPods for a short period of time and could still hear everything I needed to. The only reason I switched is because they're uncomfortable in a helmet.
When riding a motorcycle, you’ll encounter people that don’t see you almost every trip. The same is not true in a car.
Riding a bike is just a 100% engagement thing with higher risks and lower margins for error, for all kinds of reasons. And it’s not just traffic, minor pavement imperfections become relevant, the necessary skill floor is also higher. It just demands more attention, straight up.
In a car, you shouldn’t, and it’s not without risk, but you CAN occasionally get away with minor distractions: adjusting the radio, seat, etc. That just doesn’t work on a bike as well. I’m failing to properly articulate the why, but it really is fundamentally different in some ways. I’ve spent many years doing both, and the bike just demands more of your attention resources, independent of your vulnerability in the event of an accident.
A motorcycle demands your attention because the risk is mostly on the rider. Drivers are pacified by how externalized their very existent risk is.
This is to say - I am aware of the dangers:) My state doesn’t even have a helmet law for motorcyclists.
All the assertions I'm seeing in this thread are bizarre to me. One can easily hear a siren over noise cancellation and over wind noise, and it's even easier to hear if you have noise cancellation for that wind noise.
As a related example, when I'm on an airplane and I have noise-cancelling headphones on, the pilot announcements are easier to hear than without them.
As I mentioned in another comment, on an airplane, my airpods in ANC mode make it easier for me to hear announcements.
I use the bike, and I know for a fact that almost any crash with a car means me in a coffin. I need all my senses at 100%, can't afford the luxury of listening to music or wear shorts for example.
In practice this means that police won’t do anything about people wearing headphones. Wearing them is totally fine. However, if you get into an accident you might get a larger part of the blame if it’s determined that you not hearing so well contributed to the accident. (The rules of the road do have a general clause that you need to pay sufficient attention – so anything distracting might get you to shoulder more of a blame in case of an accident, even if it isn’t explicitly banned. Use common sense …)
As I said, cars are inherently quite isolating, so car-centric maniacs better try not to legislate my right to wear headphones while riding the bike aways while they sit in their sound dampened boxes, casually overtaking me with too little distance.
(I strongly suggest to never turn on noise isolation while riding the human powered kind of bike and I also recommend either turning on the pass-through mode or just putting in the earphone on the side away from the road.)
I’m also somewhat shocked the fine is that minor. Not hearing a honk or bicycle bell can be quite dangerous.
No it's not.
> protective gloves with hardened knuckles is of course mandatory
No it's not.
A big-honking stereo system isn't illegal to have at home or in a car in any jurisdiction I'm aware of, but there can be limits on how loudly it is used.
A stereo is a lot like a hammer in this way: Anyone can have a hammer. There's plenty of legal things a person can use a hammer for, and also plenty of illegal things as well. But the hammer itself, of any size, is A-OK.
There can even be time limits on when hammering is allowed[1].
[1]: I was involved in fire remediation after a friend's house burned. There was a lot of work to do, and we were working very late. The police showed up and politely told us that we'd need to keep it quiet until morning and suggested that they would find some way to make us quiet down if we didn't. We stopped hammering and tossing things into the dumpster at 11PM after that incident.
The overall picture is that a helmet’s thick material blocks high frequencies. But it exacerbates and amplifies low frequency sound and white noise. As well, a helmet confuses the ear’s capabilities for identifying direction of sound that’s incoming
If a helmet is helpful is a question of how fast the motorcycle is moving and what kinds of sounds the rider needs to hear.
It’s complicated, but wearing no helmet might be safer at low speeds because the driver is more aware. No helmet, is undoubtedly not safer at high speed because brains are fragile
Edit: a simple experiment for anyone is to put on a full size motorcycle helmet anywhere, and then you can understand how much your hearing is dampened by it. But I guess it’s probably no worse than the experience of someone driving a car, which is soundproof by design
There are certainly helmets that try to optimize for noise but there is no single one fix beyond ear plugs.
Riders need to use ear protection within the helmet unless they want to become deaf in the future, because of the wind noise.
What kind of NRR rating, active or passive, do they have?
I wear disposable foam plugs when riding, and haven't ever considered using the AirPods I have. I find the sound of the machine part of the experience of riding and wouldn't really want to get rid of it; I treat the moto sound as a kind of white noise that's different that everything else in my life (though this is with a short-ish commute, and not long-distance drudgery).
If I wanted music or comms I would probably lean more towards ear plugs plus a Cardo/Sena unit. Or perhaps something with an official ANSI/CSA NRR rating, like Isotunes.
But I also ride with foamies most of the time (laser lites) and airpods occasionally, and I'd guess that the bike and wind are maybe 10-15% louder with airpods. The foamies win out for actually staying in my ears when I put my helmet on, but if I can get it on then the airpods stay in place fine.
Surprisingly, when I was looking for a rough equivalent to NRR for Airpods, I discovered that Apple does advertise their ANC as hearing protection[1], which I'll assume the FDA has now permitted, because Apple didn't used to make that claim because the FDA wouldn't permit it. They don't offer an NRR and they do warn against impulse sounds, but that KB article suggests a 20dB drop, which is nothing compared to foamies but is in the same range as musicians' earplugs or hardhat earmuffs, and probably better than Loops.
() Bicycles and other light vehicles excluded
Unless you drive slowly, I find that driving at 60 kph max is still comfortable on the ears.
They look a little silly but cat-ears work surprisingly well.
On a motorcycle you need hearing protection due to wind noise, but good plugs will filter out the louder noises, not so much important ones.
If anyone hasn’t tried a bike radar, they are a massive help. Eg Garmin Varia. Take care with the new model, the light is insane, on 5% you have the eye of Sauron blinding the rider behind you.
Do you have a source for this info? It contradicts what I've read about the subject.
Safe cycling is all about vision. If you can't see it's safe, it's not. It isn't simply seeing imminent threats but predicting them e.g. identifying drivers that aren't paying attention and where a car could suddenly emerge like blind turnings, car doors, pedestrians and such, and countering with appropriate caution / road position.
If you find noise useful, IMHO it means you aren't sufficiently aware of your environment.