Cities aren't loud; motor vehicles are. Tire noise near heavy stroads and highways are in particular egregious offenders. There's a lot of other points in the comments about some other urban nuisances (leaf blowers, anyone?) but I encourage anyone to walk around (yes, walk) while measuring the ambient noise levels with your smartphone's microphone.
It will be extremely obvious where the noise is coming from. This is an often misunderstood part of "the war on cars:" the stress gained from additional constant noise (e.g. like a highway) takes YEARS off our lives.
And don't get me started on how loud shops are in North America. For whatever reason they seem to always keep the volume three or four levels above comfortable, making it much harder to have a conversation without shouting at least a little.
It wasn't until I started traveling a lot that I started to notice any of this. You can have your quiet part of town, but often you get to your quiet part of town by driving through the noisiest part of town where a good number of people live and work.
> And don't get me started on how loud shops are in North America. For whatever reason they seem to always keep the volume three or four levels above comfortable, making it much harder to have a conversation without shouting at least a little.
I think almost everyone operating a sound system is biased toward making it too loud. I’ve been to events for small children with painfully loud sound. There will be a DJ blasting 95-100 dB, never mind that (a) no one is on the dance floor because it’s too loud, (b) everyone is there to chat and do crafts anyway, not to listen to music, and (c) it’s actively dangerous to expose people to that volume.
I’ve also seen events where the DJ or band keeps edging the volume higher. It’s like they become desensitized to their own music and keep feeling like it needs to be 1 dB higher to sound right.
I believe that France actually regulates sound exposure. I bet that France’s maximum SPL plus a pair of good 10-15 dB earplugs would make for a great concert experience.
It’s nuts to me how loud public space music is by default these days (at least here in america.) We stereotype Californian cities like SF as being more health conscious, but even the Academy of Sciences puts their DJ every Thursday evening in a concrete and glass box with the volume cranked to instantly-dangerous levels. Like you I’ve been especially astounded by the cavalier attitude to audio safety at events targeted towards children, but imo even many bars and adult oriented venues are simply not being at all considerate of the immediate risks to their patrons from the music volume. Phonobar recently opened in SF as an “audiophile bar” and the listening room volume is usually so loud your hearing would almost instantly be damaged from stepping inside…so of course you aren’t hearing any “audiophile” quality sound even with earplugs.
At this point I just bring my earplugs everywhere, but everywhere I look around and I’m surrounded by people my age who are actively destroying their hearing and seem oblivious to it.
It seems like there should be a lot more public health education about hearing loss. That’s why it was especially disappointing to see CalAcademy not even have earplugs for sale when they operate as a music venue, along with the plainly unsafe (and poorly mixed, frankly) PA system volume.
> I’ve also seen events where the DJ or band keeps edging the volume higher. It’s like they become desensitized to their own music and keep feeling like it needs to be 1 dB higher to sound right.
This is very much a thing and not limited to DJs or bands.
Some advice I got a long time ago (but can't find the source): if you've been listening to music for a while, turn the volume down to zero, and then slowly increase the volume back to where it sounds the same. You usually end up with an absolutely lower volume but it sounds exactly the same.
Also if you go to concerts and wear earplugs, your brain eventually recalibrates the sound so eventually it sounds just like normal volume.
Here’s a new one for me: At a swimming championship, some coaches had taken to quick sharp [fingers in mouth whistling] bursts on say a breaststroke when their heads come up, which then caught on with other punters. Sometimes I was reminded of the voovoozela World Cup. Anyway one guy was particularly bad and I clocked him at 105db from 20m, but he was doing it next to people. I feel sorry for them.
Most dj’s are children and you can’t leave them alone for a second even if you’re very clear about noise restrictions, even driving very clearly into digital distortion without noticing or caring. More loud more better. Brick wall compression and have them sending hot and don’t let them near the console.
Potentially a hidden killer is exposure over time. You might be under because your 88db concert only went a couple of hours but you drove there with loud music and you’re going some place after with loud music and drive home. So nothing specifically was too loud but you’ll still be over for the day. But try having that conversation :/ far as anyone’s concerned duty of care applies while you’re in the limits of one specific place.
Not all car noise is equal though. I ride a bike regularly along an 8 lane freeway. It’s pretty amazing how hundreds if not thousands of cars go by and it’s mostly a blur of white noise. But every now and then a jackass with a loud exhaust goes by and it’s a completely different level of annoyance.
The white noise still causes stress. I remember vividly how peaceful everything was during the Covid lockdowns when almost no cars were on the road. You suddenly could hear the wind, birds and other sounds you normally don’t hear.
So the moment I leave my door until I reach my destination's door, I have my isolated Bose headphones on. Even if I'm not listening to anything, I keep them turned on and covering my ears. The other day I took them off and was alarmed by this loud sound of a car approaching just before I started to cross the street. I look over and it's a good 200m away.
Cars are ridiculously loud and few of us really recognize how loud they are.
I started nearly permanently wearing them because I read some articles about the effect of ambient noise on hearing over long-term. But since then I've also noticed how noisy and disturbing cities are in general. It's so damn peaceful and calm when I have the headphones on and I could never do without them anymore.
By necessity, unfortunately. Loud diesel engines, jackhammers and rock breakers that require workers to have hearing protection, all anchored by an undercurrent of backup alarms that must pierce the rest of the din and the hearing protection to be audible to the workers.
Many US cities and towns permit construction to happen at relatively early hours - like 6 or 7 AM. That’s usually not a problem if you’re a 9-5er.
It is a massive problem if you work late shifts. My wife works in the restaurant business and 6 or 7 AM she’s still deep asleep.
We had construction near our condo for nearly three years where spring, summer, and fall the jackhammers started at around a little before 7 every weekday. It was brutal for her.
That, plus various other issues, lead us to decide our next home is going to be a quiet single family home in a suburb. Yes - a suburb!
office complex across from house was being painted. 3 months of constant beeping from various ladder machines.
Not a single room in house could block noise. I move a couple months later. Senior center across from me starts a major project. 2 months of beeping.
Some of these are things we can control with infrastructure and regulation (e.g. why is your airport so close to housing?), and others aren't really what I would consider problematic noise.
Sirens are an unfortunate reality, but the reason they're so loud is because most cars have a ton of sound-proofing. I'm sure you know this, but you can hear sirens blocks away when they're trying to alert a driver... maybe 20 metres in front of them to move out of the way?
As for excitable drunks, I think there are places where that's a constant problem, but again, this isn't constant and permanent. Traffic noise and airplanes are pretty constant though - I live on what should be a pretty quiet stretch of land but the local stroad always has at least a few really loud cars in the wee hours of the morning. The rest of the day it's just lots of regular cars making a lot of noise as cars are want to do. At least with the excitable drunks they don't make noise all hours of the day, since they have to sleep or be drinking at some point!
I guess I don't understand what your solution is. Ban cars? Ban loud cars? Make cars have less soundproofing so that sirens can be quieter?
I'd be happy to ban loud cars, my understanding is that most places already have restrictions on stuff like e.g. motorbike silencers. Whether it's actually enforced is another thing.
If the solution is to ban cars because you don't like the noise, it sounds like you just don't like cars. They are pretty damn useful though, I'd put them in the category of construction noise - mildly annoying, unless it's yours, because you get the rewards then.
> If the solution is to ban cars because you don't like the noise, it sounds like you just don't like cars.
Guilty as charged. That said: the noise itself isn't entirely just the problem so much as how prolonged it is. Having buses and readily-available public transport that are only loud occasionally and on a fixed schedule isn't the same as a constant stream of traffic. Even if the bus or train is louder (and light rail is usually much, much quieter), it isn't all-day, only at fixed intervals.
There are marginal gains to be had. Reducing the amount of driving and traffic in our cities is good for a lot of reasons, but particularly with noise it's a combination of speed, vehicle size, and overall frequency of vehicles that makes a killer combination.
The solution is to place noise restrictions on vehicles (this goes against manufacturers putting off any kind of noise reduction), reducing speeds (this involves walkable / bikeable infrastructure), and expanding public transit like bus and light rail access to reduce the total number of personal vehicles on the road.
Yes, this will make things "worse" for drivers. But it's not the end of the world. If you ever visit Zurich or Geneva, you'll be able to distinctly tell the difference between an American city and a European city in terms of noise alone :) Zurich's tram system is honestly something that every city should dream of having, and it is as quiet as one could hope for.
I'm British. I've been to Zurich, I've also been to Los Angeles, you could probably put them as being close to diametrically opposite in terms of transport.
I don't really see why they can't both exist. America doesn't have many places like the European capitals, even somewhere like NYC still has pretty wide streets.
I don't personally think that "reducing the amount of driving" in a place that already exists is a justifiable opinion for an individual to have, it's not like we're talking about knife or gun crime here.
A more sensible approach is to increase overall mobility. If that means replacing a lane with
a tram it might make sense. We have a ton of bus lanes here in London and it works well.
Do you mean the pedestrian underpasses or the underground trains? Because the noise level in an underground train station is significantly less than at street level, it just seems louder because it is intermittent.
The SPL on the London Underground reaches maximum levels of >105dB (previous measurements on the Northern Line hit ~108dB, IIRC). Average noise levels on some parts of the deep underground lines (Victoria, Northern, etc.) can be well in excess of 80dB.
Depends on the bus, but my new “favorite” alert on my Apple Watch is the one that pops up in the tube between San Francisco and Oakland letting me know that it is now 90db and about 10 minutes of exposure to this level of noise can cause hearing loss. I believe it also accounts for the reduction in noise I’m already experiencing from my AirPods Pro, so this is 90db through the noise reduction.
Also it takes about 10 minutes, maybe a little bit less, to get through the Transbay tube. Maybe bring hearing protection if you take it everyday.
You had me questioning whether I was misremembering and I couldn’t corroborate this on the web, but luckily I took a screenshot I think the first time I got this notification back in February because I couldn’t believe it either and Photos has full text search now.
Below is the text from that screenshot:
“Loud Environment
Sound levels hit 95 decibels. Just 10 minutes at this level can cause temporary hearing loss. This measurement takes into account the sound reduction from wearing your AirPods.”
I find it fascinating. Jet engine combustion isn’t what you’re mostly hearing near an airport, when it’s really annoying.
It’s mostly the aerodynamic pressures coming from the flaps, the landing gear, and the angle into the airflow of the craft. Most planes are pretty quiet in cruise, in relative terms.
(Except for high-performance military-power engines that just don’t care. They have to defy gravity with much less stable glide lift. They also get to.)
> From photos, Tokyo can look almost unplanned, with neon signs everywhere and a huge variety of forms of architecture. You expect it to feel messy. What I experienced, however, was a city that felt almost like being in a futuristic village. It is utterly calm, in a way that is actually rather strange.
> And it took me a little while to realize why. There is simply no traffic noise. No hooting, no engine noise, not even much of the noise of cars accelerating on tarmac. Because there are so few of them. Most of the time you can walk in the middle of the street, so rare is the traffic. There are not even cars parked at the side of the road.
I used to live on Decatur street in SF, at near eye-level with the I80 overpass. I could not get out of there fast enough and don’t quite understand all the residential construction right next to highways. The tire dust is a serious problem too.
They build by the highways because the NIMBYs have forced them too. It's basically the one place you can build without serious pushback. I hope we get some serious
noise regulations.. maybe reduce the speed limits on the highways, that'll show them!! /s :)
Add to it the ridiculous sounding honks in trucks and other big vehicles, it really is causing a huge menace. I literally have PTSD for several honks we have over here in India.
Very strange that the Government here that is proud of its Bharat Stage(BS) regulations, does not factor in regulations for honks and the noise pollution that it is causing by and large!
as someone who has lived in multiple highrises, in multiple large cities both stateside and as an expat, above-ground subway is what's loud. after about the 20th floor, you don't hear the cars. The base floors are shops, then some offices - where the people live you don't hear cars. But boy do you hear the subway.
the reason the shops are loud, and the reason many offices have white noise generators or music in public areas, is so you and the person with whom you are talking have at least some level of privacy while in the middle of a crowd of people. in fact, even outside of privacy, it's a lot better to hear white noise or music, than the 20 individual conversations taking place around you.
This is what cities are - lots of people, not going far, everything is right there, and then you go up 20 floors for your quiet. If you need quiet, the place to be is not where you have thousands in density per city block. That would be like going to the indy500 and complaining about the noise.
As far as highways, a few cut through the city, but most of the city is not highways. They go around the city, with off ramps onto a few wide city roads, from which you get onto the tiny streets. There is not highway noise in 99% of the city.
leaf blowers in a city? car noise and leaf blower noise is immediate suburbs right outside the city. The urban noise in the actual city, where it's all highrises, but it's no leaf blowers, is subway, street performers, a couple of overweight (excluding an adjective because statistics look racist to some) women in bright spandex arguing, city outdoor events.
Cities aren't loud; motor vehicles are. Tire noise near heavy stroads and highways are in particular egregious offenders. There's a lot of other points in the comments about some other urban nuisances (leaf blowers, anyone?) but I encourage anyone to walk around (yes, walk) while measuring the ambient noise levels with your smartphone's microphone.
It will be extremely obvious where the noise is coming from. This is an often misunderstood part of "the war on cars:" the stress gained from additional constant noise (e.g. like a highway) takes YEARS off our lives.
And don't get me started on how loud shops are in North America. For whatever reason they seem to always keep the volume three or four levels above comfortable, making it much harder to have a conversation without shouting at least a little.
It wasn't until I started traveling a lot that I started to notice any of this. You can have your quiet part of town, but often you get to your quiet part of town by driving through the noisiest part of town where a good number of people live and work.