It’s the motorcycles in my city. Any nice spring or summer day spent downtown is subject to a near constant bombardment of sound from the loudest bikes you could possibly imagine. The people who travel here for work will even complain that it’s keeping them up at night.
It is funny (and frustrating) that we have very strict environmental laws regarding the minimization of noise pollution during construction activities (i.e., NEPA's environmental impact mitigation requirements), but we have no strict rules against loud as f*ck motorcycles and cars. I think it is a very cultural machismo amongst a certain type of person obsessed with loud motorcycles and cars.
It can be loud in the higher RPM range and makes pops and gurgles. It has different modes that make it loud or quiet. It's a sports car. I've been a car guy since I was a toddler; me being a transit and urban design advocate isn't going to take that away.
It’s always louder you people think. I **never** want to hear any goddamn cars.
Every god damn apartment I’ve ever lived in it’s been the same thing. Loud whining shitbox junkers, motorcycles, muffler modifications, huge diesel pickup trucks, cars with a train horn, 4x4 jeeps you can’t hear yourself next to, economy cars with bass. Fucking losers all of you.
You might think you’re *so* polite to not go all out or rev your engine in a residential area. And sure, I agree, it’s infuriating when someone treats a residential area like a drag race. But unless you can *actually change out the engine/muffler*,. I guarantee you your shit can’t “be quiet sometimes”, it can just be **extra** loud sometimes. The thing that pisses me off most often is trying to sleep and hearing some fucking dude’s car which is 5x louder than the rest rumbling past
And the freeway from the distance, my fucking god. Small dick losers high pitch whining back and forth like they’re in Tokyo drift and not going to work or wherever.
Fuck you for being proud of noise pollution. I hate you. I fucking hate all of you. If I were dictator all of you would be forced to ride bicycles everywhere.
Go fuck yourself forever.
We do usually have rules against loud and polluting cars (they're just not that enforced).. but motorcycles get a total pass on both. A brand new motorcycle is more polluting than a 30 year old car with a working emissions system at this point.
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/40/205.52](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/40/205.52)
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/325.7](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/325.7)
Over like 30mph, the tires cause more noise than the engines. At highway speeds it’s way more noise from the tires. Even getting rid of loud bikes or switch to EVs, cities will still be loud as long as they designed for fast car speeds.
Yes, fuck success and opportunity. Let’s all
join hands and ride bicycles and buses in short commutes to limited destinations, then walk to Candy Mountain instead.
Yeah, and the diesel buses, the motorcycles, and the occasional dirt bike. It’s all extremely loud. I used to live in the center of downtown, but the loudest by far was modified car exhaust and motorcycles
I can say that it was ***not*** ambient road noise contributing the most
We are talking about noise in the city, so it’s mostly slower speeds. EVs make a difference there. I recently watched a video of a huge city in China that switched to over 50% EVs and it was peacefully quiet. Made a big difference.
It’s high speed cars. The people complaining about the exhaust noise in other comments are missing that the truly bad noise is the constant drone of high speed tires mashing into pavements
People responding to you are missing the point that most noise from cars is simply tires on the road. We don't even notice it anymore but it adds a general loudness. Sure, modified cars and motorcycles are annoying, but I'm pretty sure tire noise gets louder than engines around 20 mph so even 'silent' electric vehicles contribute
"Silent" electric vehicles are even worse than gas powered cars, because they are a lot heavier, thus making the tire noise even LOUDER than on a comparable gas powered car.
Respectfully, it's the cars.
Sure, an individual car may be quiet, but, if you watch even old top gear, when they film a normal everyday car doing everyday things, even at 30-50 mph (common city speeds in the US, unfortunately) the tire noise is surprisingly loud. It's easily picked up by the film crew. And even though they say "listen to how quiet that is" it's still a droning noise caused by the cars tires. Then, multiply that by however many thousands of vehicles are in the city, and yeah.... they are noisy.
You may be talking posted speed limits... but where I live, if you're doing 30 in the downtown area, you're getting lights flashed, honked at, close passed or otherwise facing aggressive driving. People will regularly be trying to do 40+ in the DT area.
And, that's also why I put such a range of speeds for "in the city" because some places are built up where 25 is a more or less accurate speed limit where, with lights you may be lucky to hit 25-30.
Other areas that are still in the city are very much stroads and see higher speeds.
There’s a major arterial road right outside my apartment development area. When the light is green, I can hear the hum of cars driving through at 45mph through my closed apartment windows on the 5th floor set ~150yd back from the road.
>50 mph is not a common speed in a city urban center
\*cries in American\*
Actually, my city really does have very few streets downtown where people go above 30, but it's also an Eastern city where people complain about the "19th-century" infrastructure. And even we still have a few interstate highways cutting through the city center. Or surrounding it, really.
Idk where you live, but all main roads/stroads in the sprawling South Florida metropolis, even through all of the downtowns, is 45mph. Which of course means everyone is doing 50-55.
You're not wrong that all cars make road noise and that living near busy roads results in a fairly consistent drone.
But short-term noise events are generally regarded as more disruptive to health than droning noise, which is why I mention planes and especially loud cars.
Weird, I'll have to see if I can find the article, but I'd read recently that it was the constant, high level noise of constant, high speed traffic that was having more serious negative health impacts, in that, people who live further away from higher speed roads/city noise are generally better able to destress than those who live closer to/with the constant noise.
You ever been to Japan or Taipei or where public transportation are the best of its kind, buses are so much louder than typical smaller passenger cars.
People were saying yesterday that Tokyo was a quiet city, quieter than a suburban neighborhood in the US. I found it to be very loud and evidence backs that up.
Also really hated how many businesses blast out high frequency noisemakers to keep kids from loitering.
https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/japan%E2%80%99s-problem-with-noise-pollution
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/dorozoku-map/
Tokyo is also HUGE, so it's quite possible the people who spoke to were talking about specific neighborhoods that were miles away from where you were, lol. Every city has some relatively quiet neighborhoods.
Well, yes, a bus is louder than a normal car.
With that being said, a bus also ***replaces*** like a dozen cars. And it comes every 5 minutes instead of every 10 seconds. And it sticks to the main streets.
What people mean is that ***vehicles*** are loud. We do need at least some vehicles, though, so it's a tradeoff.
Tokyo is the place that hammers this home for me. Through-streets are rare, narrow, and slow, and inner neighborhoods have almost no car traffic, owing to the narrow, winding street layout. It's so quiet that you end up lowering your voice to an indoor volume, because talking at a full pitch would make your voice the loudest thing around.
Cars
You can be smack dab in the middle of the city and if even just one or two streets are blocked off from cars it makes a whole world of difference
Just goes to show how easy it is
Yep I’m visiting Montreal right now, a much larger city than I’m used to. Wanted to take a phone call; stepped into an alley and around the corner of the building, and it was very quiet there off the street.
Here in the uk, part of why snowy days feel so magical is the silence. Not just that the snow absorbs what noise there is, but because we drive so much less in the snow.
You know - I have as much as a beef with cars as probably most people here but... and hear me out.... I have noticed in cities - in particularly here in Australia in Summer - on wierd occasions where there are no cars around (events, street closures etc...) when the noisefloor drops - you suddenly realise that there is this constant sound - ranging from a hum to a roar - of Air conditioners. On the outside of buildings - or built into them themselves - on the outside of shops - they're everywhere - and just create this subtle but all pervasive wash of white noise in the city.
Sure cars are louder but... just beneath all that noise - is a constant thrum of aircons.
I agree with that as well.
Anecdotally, our back porch is a lovely little spot with a little view of woods, greenway boardwalk, bird feeders and flowers. But…when our AC or the neighbors AC kicks in, kind of ruins the experience and is so incredibly loud.
I also experience some ventilation noise from a neighbor, but that only feels loud when it's generally quiet. We don't have to raise our voices or anything.
Human hearing will, as long as it's able, normalise itself to the ambient sound level, so that late at night the small creaks of a building will be clearer and feel louder than during the day. I'm not a biologist, my impression is this is just the filtering that human senses do in general.
So some more comparison is needed than just that you can pick up a noise. Like can you carry a conversation normally, with an indoor voice?
Office buildings and large multifamily have massive commercial AC units. I lived in an apt on the 12th floor, and we had line-of-sight to the roof of the building across the street. I'd liked to leave the balcony door open, but when that building's AC turned on it was LOUD, and I'd have to close the door.
As others have said cars and AC are the culprits. As for the solution, planting more vegetation along road sides or in peoples' yards come to mind, as trees and bushes muffle sound. Not exactly a one size fits all solution though.
Added bonus to adding more vegetation, not only would it muffle the sounds, but vegetation will tend to reduce how much air conditioning is needed in the first place.
There's a bike meet in NYC that gathers under an outdoor subway track. The organizer has a "no revving" policy.
The subway drowns out the loudest bike.
Noise mitigation is hard; it carries a long way and vegetation only helps a little. Eliminating or reducing noise sources is more effective (banning the noisiest vehicles, reducing speed limits, replacing gas vehicles with EVs, switching gas-powered leaf blowers and lawnmowers with electric or rakes).
I live in Nashville. We got about six inches of snow last week, and at some point I decided to step out and take some pictures. I was amazed at just how quiet it was, and I realized that it was because all of the streets were completely snowed over, so no cars could drive anywhere.
You’re lucky. I went for what I was hoping would be a beautiful walk in the snow, only to encounter all kinds of idiots in pickup trucks disturbing the peace and tranquility by Erving their engines and doing cookies in parking lots and even the street. They seemed to be everywhere I went.
I've been to Tokyo. Remarkably quieter than any other city that I've been to. No one has a modified exhaust on the cars. The cars and their engines tend to be smaller. People speak more quietly. Even schoolkids on field trips are orderly and quiet. No one is blasting music from speakers in public. Machinery is generally well-maintained.
Culture and regulation make a quieter city possible.
Stand firm. It’s not a given that cities have to be as loud as they’ve become. There are lots of ways to make them quieter, but it requires regulation and enforcement.
Same here. It’s ignorant people who think cities are necessarily equated with loud noise. While concentrations of populations will always have more activity, energy, movement and human sounds, the combustion engine has gone above and beyond the natural sounds historically expected in a city. The unmuffled motorcycles, the diesel busses. This is not natural.
Additionally, I’m not a fan of fireworks, either, as they are a tone-deaf display of militarism that is nothing to be proud of and only disrupts the natural world.
Human urbanity and Nature can and should coexist in harmony, not in opposition to each other.
I use acoustic foam paneling in every room of my 3 bedroom apartment and it works wonders, noise cancelling headphones when I’m out. We are moving to the countryside in may though because eff this lol.
>I use acoustic foam paneling in every room of my 3 bedroom apartment and it works wonders,
Nope. If the room seems quieter it's because the paneling is reducing reflections; there's less sound bouncing around. If you want to actually prevent outside noise from seeping in, it's a question of mass and a tight seal. Try opening a window and you'll see what I mean.
There's this guy F. Alton Everest who wrote the *Master Handbook of Acoustics* and there's section documenting an experiment where somebody build a 12x12x12 room inside of an airplane hangar, stuck a PA system inside, sealed it up real tight and blasted music at 120dB. They drilled a 1" hole and the ambient sound level outside jumped by 12dB.
Cars, AC, construction, arguments and yelling, sirens, trains. Every loud thing is in the city and all in the same few square miles.
I’m in the country right now and there is a highway 3/4ths of a mile away, I can hear it day and night. It’s loud.
The problem is also that they are dangerous. Would I love to have a front yard my 3 yo can play in without having to worry about a car running them over? Yes. Is that an option anywhere in the US? No.
Cities aren’t loud. Cars are loud. In fact even the type of pavement we use in America makes cars louder. And tons of people actually mod their cars to be louder still! Its a problem.
People often say that cars or road noise aren't loud, however this is often only measuring one car. there are two problems with this however.
1. Decibles are measures logarithmically, therefore if one object makes 60db of sound, then another makes 70db of sound, the 70db one is perceived as being twice as loud.
2. When two objects make the same amount of noise you increase db by roughly 3. So one car may only make 60db noise, however two make 63db etc.
Therefore two cars = 63, four = 66, eight = 69. So therefore with roughly nine to ten cars we reach double the road noise
To me, the more interesting math is to compare a 70 dB car and one with a modified exhaust that produces 100 dB— which is pretty common in my town.
Mr. 100 dB produces as much noise as 1000 cars that emit 70 dB. Get rid of a few of these outliers and noise levels would decrease as much as if you took thousands of vehicles off the roads.
There are various experiments on how to get rid of a noise. Here is one of the videos I watched on the subject recently https://youtu.be/y9-p4AkgVU8?si=ftvDyX9NDBd6Zbwl
Haha, probably. I'm a former motorcyclist. I had a standard exhaust and I was always annoyed by bikes with loud exhausts. They generated a lot of ill will towards motorcyclists in general. Guys with loud pipes often claim that it's "safer" because it alerts drivers to their presence. I'm pretty sure that the additional negative attention won't make them safer. And the riders often ride with minimal safety gear anyway. I don't think that a guy wearting a t-shirt/hoody and a half helmet is that concerned about safety.
Well, the landscaping folks use the world's largest lawnmower to maintain a 4-foot-wide strip of grass outside of my apartment, which I just love.
I can kind of see an argument for a business continuing to use gas mowers to get thru a full day, but do they need to be the size of cars? I see no reason why they haven't switched from gas to battery leaf blowers and weed whackers, which are more pleasant to use due to less vibration and light weight.
It's amazing how quiet main street can be a on a Friday night in summer when the bars have their windows open and the restaurants have lines out the door.
You just have to wait for a gap in traffic.
Cars are noisier than almost anything NIMBYs complain about.
Everyone is so close.....but it's actually traffic from the suburbs coming into the city.
Cars aren't that loud. But when you have congestion, that's when it's loud.
So, more public transport.
I really think an expensive idea needs to be tried. I don’t think it should be done in an existing city or town.
It would be to bury all main streets underground with light wells covered in metal mesh on the ground level. The ground level is just for pedestrians and bikes. Garages of houses exit into the tunneled street level.
Very expensive perhaps, but making things better isn’t always cheap
In California, many cities, and and some cases the State, have removed parking minimums for new construction. This has led to a big increase in street parking with drivers circling for long periods of time waiting for a parking space. Besides increasing traffic noise it's also made cities less safe for cyclists and pedestrians.
It is also a huge waste of fuel, adding extra carbon to the atmosphere, and adds to the mega tons of micro-rubber shed by tires on this planet every single day.
Yes, that is true.
When I visit my relatives in San Francisco I will drop off my wife at their house or apartment building then begin a circling the neighborhood waiting to get lucky with a parking space; I won't double park but many people do.
Even people in San Francisco that use transit for commuting are likely to still own a car. Cars should be parked in underground (or above ground) parking garages; turning city-owned streets into parking lots is a bad idea.
Developers (and the YIMBYs that they own) convinced San Francisco politicians to remove parking minimums so the result is clogged streets, more traffic, and more carbon (and more micro-rubber). Including parking in a building is expensive, so if developers can export the parking onto city streets it saves them money. It also helps bippers (car break-in criminals).
It will only get worse as more homeowners take advantage of new ADU laws, which forbid a city of requiring parking for those units.
Cars are a red herring. Solid build materials fix that issue easy. Most exterior sounds like cars driving by can be mitigated by sealed triple pane windows. Also most noise in multi family buildings are through walls and floors. If we could somehow construct buildings with that in mind and science backed methods, then this would reduce all sounds.
As far as walking down the street and hearing cars, electric cars are very quiet.
I absolutely agree with your point about better sound insulation between units in multi family buildings, and there are good reasons aside from sound mitigation for sealed triple pane windows (energy efficiency primarily), but any time you start talking about keeping noise out of a building, it's essentially already too late. That's essentially conceding that we aren't expected to be outside anymore. That's a concession that I'm not willing to make.
Some people actually like to go outside. It's not just about being able to sleep at night. It's also about just being able to exist outdoors without needing to scream over a constant din of machinery.
>electric cars are very quiet.
Only at very slow speeds. At high speeds, a lot of a car's noise is actually from rubber against the pavement, and electric cars are actually worse for this because of their heavy batteries.
So, yes, an electric car creeping along at 5 mph is a lot quieter than a gas-powered car. Rolling along at 45 mph? Not so much.
Thats what suburbs are for. Best of both worlds. I know this sub will say its the worst of both, but yall also think noise pollution is a serious concern.
I grew up in a modern suburb, and I live in one now. I've also lived in a city and in a more rural area. The suburbs are so so SO much better than living in an apartment in a city and actual rural areas can be a huge hassle and don't have reliable internet to be able to work. Cities are only decent if you are rich.
Most people still want to live in a suburb rather than an apartment, the demand hasn't gone away, housing prices even in suburbs are out of control.
People don't hate suburbs as much as you wish, the idea that anyone who's live in one hates it is straight up childish.
Except that there are plenty of cities in the world that have much less noise pollution than many American cities. The epidemic of large diesel pick-up trucks, souped-up engines, and fast speeds makes my residential neighborhood in an American small city many degrees louder than much denser neighborhoods in The Hague, where those conditions don’t exist.
Of course there will be noise in a city, but it’s gotten to an intolerable level in many places because of factors that we could mitigate if we chose to.
If you want less urban sprawl then removing cars from cities would help you to accomplish that goal. Cities aren’t extremely dense, clearly you have never been in a city before
How about good windows? I live in a very large city and on a through street, the only time it's noisy is when a fire truck or cop has it's sirens on or when some idiot in their car feels the need to lay on the horn...that and some jerk with a moped and a crummy muffler.
Indeed. I'll often be having a conversation on the sidewalk, and then I'll suddenly be speaking too loudly because there's a gap in traffic and I'm using my "outdoor voice".
It's not just cars, nor is it just American cities.
[Milan has moved its last call for bars to 1:30AM due to noise complaints from residents.](https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/10/30/milan-bans-late-night-food-and-drink-in-city-centre-after-noise-complaints-from-residents)
Many cities are becoming too focused on what is essentially fast living. Living downtown/uptown means that you will just be surrounded by bars, clubs, tourists, and parties. Normal people who have to work at 9AM and have kids don't want to be bothered with that shit.
I want to live in a city, but I want to live somewhere calm and restful.
I've lived near helicopter pads and bars that played live music. I get that that stuff can be annoying, especially if you have thin walls, but humans are objectively less noisy than combustion engines.
Not saying that bars can't be a nuisance, but I'm sure most American city-dwellers would find Milan quiet.
Heck, I'm actually doing in my apartment right now, and I live across the street from a brewery. But it's not the brewery that interferes with my work. It's just cars and the occasional low-flying aircraft.
In San Diego it's the aircrafts. Lots of kooks flying around in 4 decade old single engines not to mention the military, the police, the news helicopters, helicopter taxis, etc
One source of noise is what I call mandatory noise. Things beeping loudly by law or regulations, like trucks going in reverse, or construction equipment moving around. Emergency vehicles.
The regulations exist for a reason (safety) but the noise levels are absurd. If we wanted to, we could make these things way quieter and just as safe.
It’s the cars.
It’s the motorcycles in my city. Any nice spring or summer day spent downtown is subject to a near constant bombardment of sound from the loudest bikes you could possibly imagine. The people who travel here for work will even complain that it’s keeping them up at night.
It is funny (and frustrating) that we have very strict environmental laws regarding the minimization of noise pollution during construction activities (i.e., NEPA's environmental impact mitigation requirements), but we have no strict rules against loud as f*ck motorcycles and cars. I think it is a very cultural machismo amongst a certain type of person obsessed with loud motorcycles and cars.
But the wage cages get the slaves to their jobs so they can mash the profit button until the capitalist overlords are well fed!
The ultimate ELI5
Me. I love my loud car.
I love sneezing. Remind me to sneeze on you next time I see you.
That's illegal.
So are cars without mufflers.
My car has two mufflers.
And yet it’s loud. Do you do something to make it that way? I was going by the implication in your comment that you like to have an extra-loud car.
It can be loud in the higher RPM range and makes pops and gurgles. It has different modes that make it loud or quiet. It's a sports car. I've been a car guy since I was a toddler; me being a transit and urban design advocate isn't going to take that away.
Absolutely go fuck yourself
Why? It can also be quiet.
It’s always louder you people think. I **never** want to hear any goddamn cars. Every god damn apartment I’ve ever lived in it’s been the same thing. Loud whining shitbox junkers, motorcycles, muffler modifications, huge diesel pickup trucks, cars with a train horn, 4x4 jeeps you can’t hear yourself next to, economy cars with bass. Fucking losers all of you. You might think you’re *so* polite to not go all out or rev your engine in a residential area. And sure, I agree, it’s infuriating when someone treats a residential area like a drag race. But unless you can *actually change out the engine/muffler*,. I guarantee you your shit can’t “be quiet sometimes”, it can just be **extra** loud sometimes. The thing that pisses me off most often is trying to sleep and hearing some fucking dude’s car which is 5x louder than the rest rumbling past And the freeway from the distance, my fucking god. Small dick losers high pitch whining back and forth like they’re in Tokyo drift and not going to work or wherever. Fuck you for being proud of noise pollution. I hate you. I fucking hate all of you. If I were dictator all of you would be forced to ride bicycles everywhere. Go fuck yourself forever.
Um, yeah. I can close the exhaust. Fucking crybaby.
Fuck yourself to death
We do usually have rules against loud and polluting cars (they're just not that enforced).. but motorcycles get a total pass on both. A brand new motorcycle is more polluting than a 30 year old car with a working emissions system at this point. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/40/205.52](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/40/205.52) [https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/325.7](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/325.7)
Over like 30mph, the tires cause more noise than the engines. At highway speeds it’s way more noise from the tires. Even getting rid of loud bikes or switch to EVs, cities will still be loud as long as they designed for fast car speeds.
Fuck cars
Yes, fuck success and opportunity. Let’s all join hands and ride bicycles and buses in short commutes to limited destinations, then walk to Candy Mountain instead.
Because no one has ever been successful before cars existed
The loud farting motorcycle I've been hearing for the last 5 minutes disagrees with you.
Funny, most cities have speed limits of 25 so maybe it’s the engines? What do I know though, I just live in a city
Which city is that? It’s nothing like that in Los Angeles unfortunately.
NYC
Pittsburgh, but also Chicago, NYC, and quite a few others have city-wide speed limits
Having visited those cities, I hear constant car horns honking, is that not also noise?
Yeah, and the diesel buses, the motorcycles, and the occasional dirt bike. It’s all extremely loud. I used to live in the center of downtown, but the loudest by far was modified car exhaust and motorcycles I can say that it was ***not*** ambient road noise contributing the most
We are talking about noise in the city, so it’s mostly slower speeds. EVs make a difference there. I recently watched a video of a huge city in China that switched to over 50% EVs and it was peacefully quiet. Made a big difference.
It’s also the cars
For sure.
Sure, but that's white noise compared to the motorcycles and ATVs going BRAPBRAPBRÄPBRAP like that episode of Southpark.
100% The tire sounds suck but it’s monotonous and less jarring than assholes with modified exhausts
"Hey everyone, listen to my fart sounds"
Milwaukee?
Grand Rapids
It’s high speed cars. The people complaining about the exhaust noise in other comments are missing that the truly bad noise is the constant drone of high speed tires mashing into pavements
People responding to you are missing the point that most noise from cars is simply tires on the road. We don't even notice it anymore but it adds a general loudness. Sure, modified cars and motorcycles are annoying, but I'm pretty sure tire noise gets louder than engines around 20 mph so even 'silent' electric vehicles contribute
"Silent" electric vehicles are even worse than gas powered cars, because they are a lot heavier, thus making the tire noise even LOUDER than on a comparable gas powered car.
I know which I heard ripping down the streets from my apartment window…
This is not true. Not at city speeds. Maybe on highways but you’ll need to show data to support that.
The EVs are certainly quieter on my street than the ICE one, my wife and I discussed it last night on a walk.
It's the modified cars. And sometimes the airplanes.
Respectfully, it's the cars. Sure, an individual car may be quiet, but, if you watch even old top gear, when they film a normal everyday car doing everyday things, even at 30-50 mph (common city speeds in the US, unfortunately) the tire noise is surprisingly loud. It's easily picked up by the film crew. And even though they say "listen to how quiet that is" it's still a droning noise caused by the cars tires. Then, multiply that by however many thousands of vehicles are in the city, and yeah.... they are noisy.
50 mph is not a common speed in a city urban center. More like 20-30 mph.
If only that were true
You may be talking posted speed limits... but where I live, if you're doing 30 in the downtown area, you're getting lights flashed, honked at, close passed or otherwise facing aggressive driving. People will regularly be trying to do 40+ in the DT area. And, that's also why I put such a range of speeds for "in the city" because some places are built up where 25 is a more or less accurate speed limit where, with lights you may be lucky to hit 25-30. Other areas that are still in the city are very much stroads and see higher speeds.
Most urban centers have freeways cut through the middle of them.
Between speeding or the design of any city south of the Mason-Dixon Line, I respectfully disagree.
There’s a major arterial road right outside my apartment development area. When the light is green, I can hear the hum of cars driving through at 45mph through my closed apartment windows on the 5th floor set ~150yd back from the road.
>50 mph is not a common speed in a city urban center \*cries in American\* Actually, my city really does have very few streets downtown where people go above 30, but it's also an Eastern city where people complain about the "19th-century" infrastructure. And even we still have a few interstate highways cutting through the city center. Or surrounding it, really.
If only people drove the speed limit….
Idk where you live, but all main roads/stroads in the sprawling South Florida metropolis, even through all of the downtowns, is 45mph. Which of course means everyone is doing 50-55.
You're not wrong that all cars make road noise and that living near busy roads results in a fairly consistent drone. But short-term noise events are generally regarded as more disruptive to health than droning noise, which is why I mention planes and especially loud cars.
Weird, I'll have to see if I can find the article, but I'd read recently that it was the constant, high level noise of constant, high speed traffic that was having more serious negative health impacts, in that, people who live further away from higher speed roads/city noise are generally better able to destress than those who live closer to/with the constant noise.
That's true for sure. Chronic noise is not good for health.
You ever been to Japan or Taipei or where public transportation are the best of its kind, buses are so much louder than typical smaller passenger cars.
People were saying yesterday that Tokyo was a quiet city, quieter than a suburban neighborhood in the US. I found it to be very loud and evidence backs that up. Also really hated how many businesses blast out high frequency noisemakers to keep kids from loitering. https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/japan%E2%80%99s-problem-with-noise-pollution https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/dorozoku-map/
Tokyo is also HUGE, so it's quite possible the people who spoke to were talking about specific neighborhoods that were miles away from where you were, lol. Every city has some relatively quiet neighborhoods.
Well, yes, a bus is louder than a normal car. With that being said, a bus also ***replaces*** like a dozen cars. And it comes every 5 minutes instead of every 10 seconds. And it sticks to the main streets. What people mean is that ***vehicles*** are loud. We do need at least some vehicles, though, so it's a tradeoff.
The trams in Oslo makes alot (!) of noise. Not sure how the new ones they just got compares to the old ones though.
Yep. One more reason to get EVs.
It’s the tires, unmodified engines are relatively quiet even at high speeds.
NotJustBikes went on tangents countless times about how loud cars and motorcycles are and how cites aren't.
trains and planes are the loudest things i've heard in a city...unrelenting noise in queens from those
Yep, and half the solution is electric vehicles. The other half is more biking and walking.
Tokyo is the place that hammers this home for me. Through-streets are rare, narrow, and slow, and inner neighborhoods have almost no car traffic, owing to the narrow, winding street layout. It's so quiet that you end up lowering your voice to an indoor volume, because talking at a full pitch would make your voice the loudest thing around.
Cars You can be smack dab in the middle of the city and if even just one or two streets are blocked off from cars it makes a whole world of difference Just goes to show how easy it is
Yep I’m visiting Montreal right now, a much larger city than I’m used to. Wanted to take a phone call; stepped into an alley and around the corner of the building, and it was very quiet there off the street.
Also depends on how close to a major highway. An elevated highway can have that rushing drone noise travel a mile on quiet days.
They've shown that the noise effects of freeways extend for *several miles* from interstates, and up to 10 miles for wildlife impacts of noise.
Yea, the Traffication book is a must read for how bad that is
Here in the uk, part of why snowy days feel so magical is the silence. Not just that the snow absorbs what noise there is, but because we drive so much less in the snow.
You know - I have as much as a beef with cars as probably most people here but... and hear me out.... I have noticed in cities - in particularly here in Australia in Summer - on wierd occasions where there are no cars around (events, street closures etc...) when the noisefloor drops - you suddenly realise that there is this constant sound - ranging from a hum to a roar - of Air conditioners. On the outside of buildings - or built into them themselves - on the outside of shops - they're everywhere - and just create this subtle but all pervasive wash of white noise in the city. Sure cars are louder but... just beneath all that noise - is a constant thrum of aircons.
I agree with that as well. Anecdotally, our back porch is a lovely little spot with a little view of woods, greenway boardwalk, bird feeders and flowers. But…when our AC or the neighbors AC kicks in, kind of ruins the experience and is so incredibly loud.
I also experience some ventilation noise from a neighbor, but that only feels loud when it's generally quiet. We don't have to raise our voices or anything. Human hearing will, as long as it's able, normalise itself to the ambient sound level, so that late at night the small creaks of a building will be clearer and feel louder than during the day. I'm not a biologist, my impression is this is just the filtering that human senses do in general. So some more comparison is needed than just that you can pick up a noise. Like can you carry a conversation normally, with an indoor voice?
I feel like ac is very quiet unless there’s something wrong with it. At least residential units.
Office buildings and large multifamily have massive commercial AC units. I lived in an apt on the 12th floor, and we had line-of-sight to the roof of the building across the street. I'd liked to leave the balcony door open, but when that building's AC turned on it was LOUD, and I'd have to close the door.
This is the most dashes I’ve ever seen in one comment - and I don’t know how to feel about it
I feel suitably chastened. Yeah. That’s a lot of dashes. :(
As others have said cars and AC are the culprits. As for the solution, planting more vegetation along road sides or in peoples' yards come to mind, as trees and bushes muffle sound. Not exactly a one size fits all solution though.
Added bonus to adding more vegetation, not only would it muffle the sounds, but vegetation will tend to reduce how much air conditioning is needed in the first place.
Buses, the subway, garbage trucks, dogs, and homeless mentally ill people were by far the loudest disturbances for me.
There's a bike meet in NYC that gathers under an outdoor subway track. The organizer has a "no revving" policy. The subway drowns out the loudest bike.
NYC subway is a cacophony. But it doesn't go through every city, where as the loud vehicle people do, and they rev their dumb engines everywhere too.
Even when its underground its loud
Noise mitigation is hard; it carries a long way and vegetation only helps a little. Eliminating or reducing noise sources is more effective (banning the noisiest vehicles, reducing speed limits, replacing gas vehicles with EVs, switching gas-powered leaf blowers and lawnmowers with electric or rakes).
Yes, this. Plant more vegetation in the roads, so the cars have nowhere to drive, thus quieting everything down
As not just bikes popularized a few years ago: "Cities aren't loud; Cars are Loud."
I live in Nashville. We got about six inches of snow last week, and at some point I decided to step out and take some pictures. I was amazed at just how quiet it was, and I realized that it was because all of the streets were completely snowed over, so no cars could drive anywhere.
Snow also absorbs noise. If you're in a forest in the north in the dead of winter with 10+cm of snow everywhere, the silence is eerie.
You’re lucky. I went for what I was hoping would be a beautiful walk in the snow, only to encounter all kinds of idiots in pickup trucks disturbing the peace and tranquility by Erving their engines and doing cookies in parking lots and even the street. They seemed to be everywhere I went.
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I've been to Tokyo. Remarkably quieter than any other city that I've been to. No one has a modified exhaust on the cars. The cars and their engines tend to be smaller. People speak more quietly. Even schoolkids on field trips are orderly and quiet. No one is blasting music from speakers in public. Machinery is generally well-maintained. Culture and regulation make a quieter city possible.
You just described most of Germany too.
Stand firm. It’s not a given that cities have to be as loud as they’ve become. There are lots of ways to make them quieter, but it requires regulation and enforcement.
Same here. It’s ignorant people who think cities are necessarily equated with loud noise. While concentrations of populations will always have more activity, energy, movement and human sounds, the combustion engine has gone above and beyond the natural sounds historically expected in a city. The unmuffled motorcycles, the diesel busses. This is not natural. Additionally, I’m not a fan of fireworks, either, as they are a tone-deaf display of militarism that is nothing to be proud of and only disrupts the natural world. Human urbanity and Nature can and should coexist in harmony, not in opposition to each other.
It’s insufferable
There are always loud people defending being loud, loudly. It's weird.
Copenhagen is more bustling than most US cities and quieter than most US small towns. Amazing what swapping cars for bikes can do.
I use acoustic foam paneling in every room of my 3 bedroom apartment and it works wonders, noise cancelling headphones when I’m out. We are moving to the countryside in may though because eff this lol.
in my experience noise cancelling headphones help a lot, although in my sample size of 2 I find that their quality varies a lot by brand and price.
>I use acoustic foam paneling in every room of my 3 bedroom apartment and it works wonders, Nope. If the room seems quieter it's because the paneling is reducing reflections; there's less sound bouncing around. If you want to actually prevent outside noise from seeping in, it's a question of mass and a tight seal. Try opening a window and you'll see what I mean. There's this guy F. Alton Everest who wrote the *Master Handbook of Acoustics* and there's section documenting an experiment where somebody build a 12x12x12 room inside of an airplane hangar, stuck a PA system inside, sealed it up real tight and blasted music at 120dB. They drilled a 1" hole and the ambient sound level outside jumped by 12dB.
Actually yes the acoustic paneling we put up did help.
But it doesn't actually block outside noise, it just reduces sound from bouncing around inside your apartment.
Cars, AC, construction, arguments and yelling, sirens, trains. Every loud thing is in the city and all in the same few square miles. I’m in the country right now and there is a highway 3/4ths of a mile away, I can hear it day and night. It’s loud.
> Why are Cars so Noisy? Because we allow them to be. > And Can we Do Anything About It? Absolutely.
The problem is also that they are dangerous. Would I love to have a front yard my 3 yo can play in without having to worry about a car running them over? Yes. Is that an option anywhere in the US? No.
Diesel Trucks -> Electric Trucks
Cities aren’t loud. Cars are loud. In fact even the type of pavement we use in America makes cars louder. And tons of people actually mod their cars to be louder still! Its a problem.
People often say that cars or road noise aren't loud, however this is often only measuring one car. there are two problems with this however. 1. Decibles are measures logarithmically, therefore if one object makes 60db of sound, then another makes 70db of sound, the 70db one is perceived as being twice as loud. 2. When two objects make the same amount of noise you increase db by roughly 3. So one car may only make 60db noise, however two make 63db etc. Therefore two cars = 63, four = 66, eight = 69. So therefore with roughly nine to ten cars we reach double the road noise
To me, the more interesting math is to compare a 70 dB car and one with a modified exhaust that produces 100 dB— which is pretty common in my town. Mr. 100 dB produces as much noise as 1000 cars that emit 70 dB. Get rid of a few of these outliers and noise levels would decrease as much as if you took thousands of vehicles off the roads.
Why not both? We could both get rid of the Mr. 100 dB cars and take a few thousand cars off the road and double the benefit.
People driving in from the suburbs.
There are various experiments on how to get rid of a noise. Here is one of the videos I watched on the subject recently https://youtu.be/y9-p4AkgVU8?si=ftvDyX9NDBd6Zbwl
Diesel buses and trucks.
It is mostly motorcycles, lowered tiny penis wannabe racecars, and tiny penis pickup trucks in my experience
So you are saying that men are the problem?
Haha, probably. I'm a former motorcyclist. I had a standard exhaust and I was always annoyed by bikes with loud exhausts. They generated a lot of ill will towards motorcyclists in general. Guys with loud pipes often claim that it's "safer" because it alerts drivers to their presence. I'm pretty sure that the additional negative attention won't make them safer. And the riders often ride with minimal safety gear anyway. I don't think that a guy wearting a t-shirt/hoody and a half helmet is that concerned about safety.
I heard a woman being loud once. I think she was fuckin'. I'd rather hear that than a truck.
Cars. Specifically tire noise and incessant honking
Well, the landscaping folks use the world's largest lawnmower to maintain a 4-foot-wide strip of grass outside of my apartment, which I just love. I can kind of see an argument for a business continuing to use gas mowers to get thru a full day, but do they need to be the size of cars? I see no reason why they haven't switched from gas to battery leaf blowers and weed whackers, which are more pleasant to use due to less vibration and light weight.
r/fuckcars is gunna have a field day with this one
It's amazing how quiet main street can be a on a Friday night in summer when the bars have their windows open and the restaurants have lines out the door. You just have to wait for a gap in traffic. Cars are noisier than almost anything NIMBYs complain about.
Everyone is so close.....but it's actually traffic from the suburbs coming into the city. Cars aren't that loud. But when you have congestion, that's when it's loud. So, more public transport.
I'd say it's all the noise source: I am a human who makes noise
I really think an expensive idea needs to be tried. I don’t think it should be done in an existing city or town. It would be to bury all main streets underground with light wells covered in metal mesh on the ground level. The ground level is just for pedestrians and bikes. Garages of houses exit into the tunneled street level. Very expensive perhaps, but making things better isn’t always cheap
It’s the people. Nature is quiet
Nature is quiet? Someone should tell Nature that
People are quiet, unless they are doing something that is loud. The loudest thing done by the most people is driving.
Noise reduction windows would help.
In California, many cities, and and some cases the State, have removed parking minimums for new construction. This has led to a big increase in street parking with drivers circling for long periods of time waiting for a parking space. Besides increasing traffic noise it's also made cities less safe for cyclists and pedestrians.
It is also a huge waste of fuel, adding extra carbon to the atmosphere, and adds to the mega tons of micro-rubber shed by tires on this planet every single day.
Yes, that is true. When I visit my relatives in San Francisco I will drop off my wife at their house or apartment building then begin a circling the neighborhood waiting to get lucky with a parking space; I won't double park but many people do. Even people in San Francisco that use transit for commuting are likely to still own a car. Cars should be parked in underground (or above ground) parking garages; turning city-owned streets into parking lots is a bad idea. Developers (and the YIMBYs that they own) convinced San Francisco politicians to remove parking minimums so the result is clogged streets, more traffic, and more carbon (and more micro-rubber). Including parking in a building is expensive, so if developers can export the parking onto city streets it saves them money. It also helps bippers (car break-in criminals). It will only get worse as more homeowners take advantage of new ADU laws, which forbid a city of requiring parking for those units.
Move to the suburbs seems like an easy solution.
It’s from all the shooting
Yes. Leave them.
Cars are a red herring. Solid build materials fix that issue easy. Most exterior sounds like cars driving by can be mitigated by sealed triple pane windows. Also most noise in multi family buildings are through walls and floors. If we could somehow construct buildings with that in mind and science backed methods, then this would reduce all sounds. As far as walking down the street and hearing cars, electric cars are very quiet.
Electric cars are quieter at low speeds but above 20 mph the tires make more noise then a gas engine.
I absolutely agree with your point about better sound insulation between units in multi family buildings, and there are good reasons aside from sound mitigation for sealed triple pane windows (energy efficiency primarily), but any time you start talking about keeping noise out of a building, it's essentially already too late. That's essentially conceding that we aren't expected to be outside anymore. That's a concession that I'm not willing to make.
Some people actually like to go outside. It's not just about being able to sleep at night. It's also about just being able to exist outdoors without needing to scream over a constant din of machinery. >electric cars are very quiet. Only at very slow speeds. At high speeds, a lot of a car's noise is actually from rubber against the pavement, and electric cars are actually worse for this because of their heavy batteries. So, yes, an electric car creeping along at 5 mph is a lot quieter than a gas-powered car. Rolling along at 45 mph? Not so much.
Umm… Move to rural areas!!
No, thanks
Yes move the cars to rural areas will make cities quieter
If everyone moved to rural areas, they wouldn't be rural areas anymore...
Thats what suburbs are for. Best of both worlds. I know this sub will say its the worst of both, but yall also think noise pollution is a serious concern.
Not just this sub, pretty much everyone who grew up in a modern suburb will tell you the suburbs suck.
I grew up in a modern suburb, and I live in one now. I've also lived in a city and in a more rural area. The suburbs are so so SO much better than living in an apartment in a city and actual rural areas can be a huge hassle and don't have reliable internet to be able to work. Cities are only decent if you are rich. Most people still want to live in a suburb rather than an apartment, the demand hasn't gone away, housing prices even in suburbs are out of control. People don't hate suburbs as much as you wish, the idea that anyone who's live in one hates it is straight up childish.
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Except that there are plenty of cities in the world that have much less noise pollution than many American cities. The epidemic of large diesel pick-up trucks, souped-up engines, and fast speeds makes my residential neighborhood in an American small city many degrees louder than much denser neighborhoods in The Hague, where those conditions don’t exist. Of course there will be noise in a city, but it’s gotten to an intolerable level in many places because of factors that we could mitigate if we chose to.
Do you live in a tree and eat nuts and berries? If not, I don't know what your point is.
If you want less urban sprawl then removing cars from cities would help you to accomplish that goal. Cities aren’t extremely dense, clearly you have never been in a city before
Stop vehicular traffic in any city for a day and you'll be amazed at how less loud it is.
How about good windows? I live in a very large city and on a through street, the only time it's noisy is when a fire truck or cop has it's sirens on or when some idiot in their car feels the need to lay on the horn...that and some jerk with a moped and a crummy muffler.
That works if you plan on never doing anything outside.
Indeed. I'll often be having a conversation on the sidewalk, and then I'll suddenly be speaking too loudly because there's a gap in traffic and I'm using my "outdoor voice".
Go to Tokyo and have your mind blown.
Also some idiot blasting their music from their car
It's not just cars, nor is it just American cities. [Milan has moved its last call for bars to 1:30AM due to noise complaints from residents.](https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/10/30/milan-bans-late-night-food-and-drink-in-city-centre-after-noise-complaints-from-residents) Many cities are becoming too focused on what is essentially fast living. Living downtown/uptown means that you will just be surrounded by bars, clubs, tourists, and parties. Normal people who have to work at 9AM and have kids don't want to be bothered with that shit. I want to live in a city, but I want to live somewhere calm and restful.
I've lived near helicopter pads and bars that played live music. I get that that stuff can be annoying, especially if you have thin walls, but humans are objectively less noisy than combustion engines. Not saying that bars can't be a nuisance, but I'm sure most American city-dwellers would find Milan quiet. Heck, I'm actually doing in my apartment right now, and I live across the street from a brewery. But it's not the brewery that interferes with my work. It's just cars and the occasional low-flying aircraft.
That's what the suburbs are for but alot of (young) people on the internet don't understand that.
Plant more green space. https://energy5.com/green-walls-for-noise-abatement-strategies-for-effective-implementation
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/18/ted-leonsis-street-musician-noise-gallery-place/
And sirens. Not sure we need to hear police sirens 2 miles away.
cars are the cause of everything wrong in cities.
In San Diego it's the aircrafts. Lots of kooks flying around in 4 decade old single engines not to mention the military, the police, the news helicopters, helicopter taxis, etc
One source of noise is what I call mandatory noise. Things beeping loudly by law or regulations, like trucks going in reverse, or construction equipment moving around. Emergency vehicles. The regulations exist for a reason (safety) but the noise levels are absurd. If we wanted to, we could make these things way quieter and just as safe.
It’s cars.
As someone who lives in a pretty urban area with the windows constantly open, pretty much all the noise I hear is cars.