I want them to go after muffler shops for noise pollution.
Most states have laws that you can't modify an exhaust to be louder than the stock exhaust.
Yet in every urban area you can hear some percentage of drivers that modify their cars to be 10x louder than everyone else, often with "crackle and pop" tunes to intentionally defeat emissions controls to leave unburnt gasoline to detonate in the exhaust every time they lift off the gas.
It's not just urban areas. It is a scourge that plagues literally every corner of the world. There is nowhere in the city, the suburbs, small towns, or the middle of nowhere where you aren't subject to industrial levels of noise pollution generated by motor vehicles that have been intentionally and illegally modified to make as much noise as possible.
It used to just be motorcycles and sports cars. But it's now the most basic pickup trucks, family sedans, SUVs, and anything else that explodes fuel to move.
The total and complete lack of enforcement of existing noise pollution laws is the number one cause of the spread of this.
I had this problem – near 24/7 noise – but moved 20 miles west to a suburb that has speed bumps and significantly less through traffic. The average dBs outside went from ~65 to ~45. Maybe in the US, at least, the issue is that the quiet urban/suburban places are much more expensive than the loud places and so are relatively inaccessible?
Though, now that I think about it, the depths of New York City will be both very expensive and very loud.
I live in a place that was very similar to what you describe. In the last couple years it's become as bad as where I moved from some days.
A lot of it is the surrounding areas have been surrendered to the noise makers and residents in my town are friends with them and they come and go as they please at all hours, unhindered by law enforcement.
But dismayingly, more of the residents are getting louder themselves for whatever reason. The worst part is they by and large follow the speed limit but are still insanely loud so the police just look at it like I'm just annoyed and need to get over it.
It's truly the easiest thing to catch. I can't fathom why there's so little interest at any level of government to tackle this problem.
The first moves are being made on this. A couple of cities have just started trialing noise detection systems for loud vehicles. I’d like to see this rolled out more, especially in cities where a single asshole on a motorbike can disturb tens of thousands of people in minutes.
What paradise are you in, protecting from noise pollution?
I am in Europe and an opposite problem is that the emission control systems of recent (gasoline) cars are not noise insulated... After you stop a car, it is random artillery for two hours (apparently as they cool down from temperatures of many hundreds degrees).
(Edit: I just replaced 'the opposite problem' with 'an opposite problem'... Former form was misleading.)
I live in the center of an EU capital and there are three main sources of ICE noise:
- motorbikes (with modified exhausts or not, at high speeds the engine itself is loud enough to disturb sleep of thousands of people)
- 'sport' car abominations with intentionally loud exhaust and engine noises
- some diesel cars (old vans etc) are very loud, in this case it's just the nature of the diesel engine.
At least the first two cases should be prosecuted by the police and new vehicles not registered. But never have I seen/heard this level of noise being due to an emission control system, in a stopped car.
Different EU city here, exact same experience. People tune their shitty 25cc motorcycles to sound like a jet engine, people tune their shitty 1200cc cars to sound like a jet engine, and that's 99% of all vehicle-related noise right there.
I live next to a highway on-ramp. The motorcycles are the worst, some of them are so loud while accelerating that it is impossible to have a conversation on my yard, over a hundred meters away.
The city is now investing tens of millions of euros to retrofit a noise barrier to protect our neighborhood. I think our house surfers the most from the noise. Yet - if it only wasn't for those loud motorcycles I would think the noise barrier is unnecessary. It would be much more cost effective to set and enforce noise pollution rules than to build expensive noise protection infrastructure everywhere where people live close to roads.
Reasonably you will lose the discrimination of the "artillery" if you live in a generally loud area - it is not a matter of scalar comparison but of modalities. Place a gasoline vehicle in a parking space and you will hear random bangs from here and there. Bring it to a quiet place, and you will be startled (or worse).
Very unfortunately, yes, I could ;) (...not right now though.)
But look, if you are trying to understand which noise I was referring to: stop some gasoline cars, from euro-5 on, after the engine has been on for a good number of miles, and after a few minutes you will hear like a "loud bang on metal" (very distinct from the usual crackles from the cooling metal), like a coiled spring loudly released, then after more minutes another one... Even after an hour, or more, it will randomly go on... Silent for a long time, then "bang".
I've got an Euro-5 gasoline car and never noticed anything like that, also when driving other/newer cars, and my office window is to a small parking lot, and there also isn't anything like that happening (I am very sensitive to noises). So I think this must me something specific to a car model.
To play the devil's advocate. Not all motorcycle noise is bad. As a car driver, I'm sometimes grateful that I hear bikes before I can see them, they can very easily hide in a blind spot. The way they move through the traffic is in may cases illegal, but I'm not a law enforcement. They drive the way they drive, I can't change that. My primary concern is to not hit them, and some noise on their part helps in that.
From my experience even reasonably priced cars have decent enough noise insulation. Exhaust pipes face back. Inverse square law means the radio has to do very little work to be louder. All this added up you'll only hear the noise terrorist as they're lane splitting next to you.
The US largely doesn't have that. As a German where you got to have your vehicle inspected for code compliance every two years, watching US dashcam videos is completely amazing - some of the shit you're allowed to put on roads there would yield you actual prison time if you tried it in Germany, and not to mention that there are states that do not require a general liability insurance - here it's mandatory to have coverage for at least 7.5 million euros in healthcare, 1.22 million for property damage and 50.000 € for financial loss (say, lost income because the car of the other party is a work car and they need to rent a replacement). Most insurances go above and beyond, standard is like 50 million € of coverage - to hit that, you'd need to crash into a tanker truck on a bridge which then falls down onto a residential home and exploding, or similar sized catastrophes that almost never happen.
Liability insurance for a VW Golf with 15 million € coverage around 160€ a year [1], if you want replacement/weather damage coverage it's about 300-400€. New drivers obviously pay (way) more.
I don't understand how they don't measure exhaust noise levels there! It would at least make it much harder for people to keep the exhaust on if they had to remove it and put it back on for the check.
A lot of manufacturers put in "crackle and pop" as well, on the more sporty models. I guess the catalytic converters etc must be built to handle it, in that case.
It's just a pressure difference, no need for explosions. You can create it with a lean mode as well it's less effective but doesn't kill the muffler and catalytic converter. It's still highly annoying though.
Only effective way to prevent it is a once off "fix it or it get's crushed" notice. And crush it the second time to a tiny tin box.
Thinking more I guess the stock ones are more a kind of "burble on overrun" and maybe a mild anti-lag on shifting (especially on dual clutch models).. thinking of BMW here.
>> Most states have laws that you can't modify an exhaust to be louder than the stock exhaust
Not the big ones. California only limits to 95db, regardless of what stock was. And what is "stock"? Like new? Mufflers start to wear out, getting louder, the moment a car is first started. Not everyone can afford to drive a new car, or even keep replacing the muffler every couple years to maintain some notion of "stock" tailpipe sound. Some of the loudest cars/trucks are simply those old enough to have broken mufflers.
And people with deliberately loud cars want loud cars. If it wasnt mufflers it would be loud sound systems. If not those then it would be loud horns.
Most states have laws that you can't modify an exhaust to be louder than the stock exhaust.
Yet in every urban area you can hear some percentage of drivers that modify their cars to be 10x louder than everyone else, often with "crackle and pop" tunes to intentionally defeat emissions controls to leave unburnt gasoline to detonate in the exhaust every time they lift off the gas.