Yes, it's frustrating that some people just don't believe in the human right to peace and quiet.

That's one reason why I have no hope for self-organizing models of society. There are griefers who only respond to force, and it doesn't take many of them to fuck up the whole game.

Lately I've come to the conclusion that peace and quiet really is a luxury to have. Most people I don't think get to experience it. You need to have money to have it so you can live somewhere nice. Other wise your stuck living in apartment buildings, crowded cities, next to noisy neighbors. Go to busy shared spaces (ppl stop playing radios out doors!) or staying in shitty hotels.

> Lately I've come to the conclusion that peace and quiet really is a luxury to have. Most people I don't think get to experience it.

It absolutely is. I got the chance to live in a quiet neighborhood near the ocean for a few months and I think back fondly to the level of calm during evening walks there. It felt downright _nourishing_ to my psyche.

This is contrast to living within line of sight to San Diego Airport with the first airplane taking off at 6:31a. In addition to waking me up it would also trigger a significant amount of stress - not a great way to start the day.

Cities are not designed for anything resembling healthy living currently. I hope this changes soon.

My apartment complex fire alarms go off once a week due to one smoker or food burning in a single building which then causes every building to start alarming. This week, they are doing testing which means that an entire building fire alarm will go off for every individual unit they test. There are 1000 units here and almost 100 are in my building. I have heard the fire alarm go off nearly 100 distinct times and I don’t even register fire alarms as being useful anymore. These people hate me and want me to die in a fire.

That genuinely sounds like hell - hoping you get a calm environment soon.

It's almost criminal that houses are built so close to the airport. I have a few friends who live downtown in that area and it seems like hell.

Indeed. I understand it's a multi-faceted issue given the economic development the airport has provided (and continues to provide), but it seems health and wellness externalities were not priced in fully. Now that the airport is built and housing density only continues to increase - where does this lead?

From the wikipedia article:

> SAN is in a populated area. To appease the concerns of the airport's neighbors regarding noise and possible ensuing lawsuits, a curfew was put in place in 1979. Takeoffs are allowed between 6:30 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. Outside those hours, they are subject to a large fine. Arrivals are permitted 24 hours per day.[47] While several flights have scheduled departure times before 6:30 a.m., these times are pushback times; the first takeoff roll is at 6:30 a.m.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_International_Airpor...

I've taken off later than 11:30 PM, i think realistically 12:30 is the cutoff, especially on very busy days. I remember hearing that the first month of lockdown was blissful because there were so few flights coming through.

There are plenty of poor people with peace and quiet in rural areas.

I’m not so sure about that, nature is often loud AF. Agriculture, too.

Have you experienced it? I live rural and actually close to railway/highway but the comparison to urban noise is not even close.

Lol yes. I'm currently avoiding opening up doors/windows because the cicadas are sufficiently loud that I've had ringing in my ears every night for the past week.

Then I see the downvotes on my earlier comment and wonder just what image people have of rural living. Last year I didn't get a wink of sleep on an overnight camp because bullfrogs went hard out the entire night.

Also I'm not sure how this became a binary comparison of the densest urban environments or the sparsest rural retreats. The suburbs exist and that's actually where most people live.

Single examples don't refute the statement that many poor rural areas are quiet. However, if many poor rural areas are quiet, then the assertion that quiet is a luxury is contradicted.

I agree with that take

Short of living near a fast moving river, nature is rarely as consistently loud as living in a city. Rural living, away [0] from rivers and highways (mainly interstates) is remarkably quiet and often very affordable in most of the country.

[0] This doesn't even have to be very far away, and noise can be substantially reduced with a fairly small group of trees between you and the noise source.

I've lived through all the spectrum of apartments from modest to exclusive and luxurious. One thing does not imply the other, it's a matter of luck + how (un)civilized are the people surrounding you.

You've obviously never lived in a penthouse or a private residence on a 20 acre property. Noise pollution is not an issue in those situations.

Yes, one of the things that blew me away about luxury apartments in NYC is the level of soundproofing - both in the windows as well as the thickness between floors/ceiling (a foot plus, iirc).

Depending on where that 20 acres is, you can get it for less than the price of a coastal-city closet.

You'll have a hard life ahead of you, though.

You're right, haven't experienced anything beyond 10M. I guess at the very top you don't have these issues at all.

What do you mean by it's a luxury? That it's nice? or rare? or should be rare?

I think rare in the sense that few can afford to have it.

Part of the problem is that those who don't appreciate it will see how nice a quiet town in the country is, then move from the big city to that town and destroy the very thing they originally enjoyed.

Or bring a bluetooth boombox into the wilderness and play it so it can be heard for a mile away.

I'm sure that every country have tiny villages with cheap land. Buy enough land, build a house in the center, grow some trees around and you'll have peaceful house.

Of course there are other issues with that lifestyle which is why it's not adopted widely, like no work, issues for children, issues with healthcare, but for some people it could work, IMO.

> no work, issues for children, issues with healthcare

There's the rub, no? You need to have a lot of money saved up to not have to work which makes it a luxury. For most people, they need to live near work, which is mostly in or near dense noisy cities.

I'm basically FI and could do that, but the problem is I'd be leaving everyone I know to live alone in a middle of nowhere. Granted, a pretty and picteresque middle of nowhere, but still, it sounds like a recipe for misery. That's why I endure living in a loud and smoggy city...

Just remember the cure can be worse than the disease. I agree with you - mostly because of people who "roll coal" to poison cyclists for fun - but I'm wary of involving authority and force. Somehow there are societies that don't have as much of a problem with things like this, so maybe we should learn from them.

Aren't the societies that don't have these problems, often societies that readily employ authority & force & social coercion? Singapore, Japan.

You believe we need a more authoritarian society because some people live lives that are louder than you deem appropriate and enough so that you are willing to 'respond with force' and you somehow see them as the people who are "fucking up the whole game"?

I don't think the city council is oppressing anyone by having the police issue citations to people who wake me up at night with their obnoxious mufflers.

The personal satisfaction from having a loud muffler is actually less important than my ability to sleep at night.

I may be misunderstanding, but having a city council isn't an antithesis to self organizing societies.

In my understanding abandoning self organizing societies that could have more or less noise friendly communities in favor of top down politics that more closely resemble a centrally planned society/dictatorship.

Allowing a city to define what it means to live within it is generally accepted as not the same as a centrally planned society. Certainly that is the case within the United States, where there are very many options for what kind of city one wants to live in. We are not talking about city-states like Singapore. So yeah, we can penalize the noisemakers and not lose any sleep that we're degrading into a dictatorship.

The Coase Theorem suggests that, with sufficiently frictionless microtransactions, people who prefer to make noise and people who prefer not to hear noise could all be happier.

Maybe a phone app with a decibel-meter and a distance metric to each other such app within hearing distance, with pre-authorized amounts to transfer for each decibel level created/experienced?

"could all be happier" probably not, since currently the noisemakers are maximally happy making noise without paying anybody.

Lots of them would be happier to get a small amount of money for being just a little bit quieter. People preferring peace and quiet would be happy to pay a small amount of money to get fans of noisemaking to stay below their annoyance threshold.

Rough sketch of a potential process: Harley Q. is riding through the hills with the throttle open when her phone buzzes, indicating she's approaching an area with residents willing to pay above her threshold for <80db experienced noise. She rolls off the throttle and coasts through the upcoming neighborhood, or takes the long way around. Maybe a small extra payment would be put in escrow if she doesn't approach that area while making noise for a few more weeks.

Please note that the apparent bias toward paying the noisemaker is an artifact of existing noise ordinances. Coase can only help us from where we currently are, not from an imaginary utopia.

If we place this in a hypothetical city with a 40db noise restriction, which allows neighborhoods to accept louder noises by consensus, the payments reverse; Ms. Q will try to select the cheapest neighborhood she can enjoy her noise through, and its residents will end up collectively richer in exchange for suffering through the noise.

That's like saying, "I'll stop punching you if you pay me $50, but until then I'm really enjoying punching you." Assholes are assholes and should not be paid to not be assholes, they should just stop it or pay others whenever they cross the line (via fines or other means).

> That's like saying, "I'll stop punching you if you pay me $50, but until then I'm really enjoying punching you."

It's not at all like that, because punching people is currently illegal, and making noise up to a certain threshold is legal. I like peace and quiet more than I like making noise, so I wouldn't mind a lower legal threshold; but the advantage of paying people instead of fighting to change laws is that there's no actual fight.

The advantage of casting things as a moral struggle instead of a difference in preferences is, of course, that you might be able to gather enough allies to defeat the other side and take their stuff.

If I can change the laws first, then the other side will have to pay me. How to decide what's the best "starting point" for a Coase bargain?

The starting point for a Coase bargain is here, now. If you successfully get the laws changed before bargaining, that gives you a different starting point for bargaining.

If you do have the ability to reliably get laws changed at some expense, you should bring that up while bargaining; it will give you a stronger position. You should be able to get a deal that's better than actually spending whatever resource it would take to change the law.

That makes sense to me.

This is an interesting perspective. Can I ask what your background is that exposed you to this way of thinking?

Lots of reading game theory & economics, and saying "that doesn't make any sense," then reading it again until it made sense. The "rationalsphere" is where I read most of it; sites like lesswrong, overcomingbias, putanumonit, and thezvi.

Sounds like a magnet for noisemakers to route their trips through while staying just at or under the annoyance threshold -- a threshold which, with increased sensitivity, may be shifting lower.

You'll note that I already suggested a small additional payment in escrow for noisemakers to stay away for a few weeks or whatever. I also doubt even the most noise-sensitive neighborhoods would be willing to pay enough to make regular, special trips just for noise-profiteering worthwhile. If they were, it would probably approach the strength of preference that they'd be willing to fight to change local noise ordinances and get an enforcement push.

Thanks for the correction, I see it better now.

My willingness to accept your loud muffler bottoms out at $100,000 per 100 mS per decibel over 40 dB. If you're willing to put up $4-5 million every time you drive by my house, I'm willing to let you pay me for the privilege of ruining my sleep for your stupid car.

Are you Jeff Bezos? You must be crazy rich to not accept less that $4m for a minute of inconvenience. I'd endure it for $100 - with just a couple bikes per day, I wouldn't have to work!

This is a naïve free market view.

Unless you have a government under your thumb, you'll never compel a population to install this app and all use it. Even if you did manage to convince people to use it, participants will game it into submission before it ever gained relevancy.

> you'll never compel a population to install this app and all use it.

Everyone who uses the app gets something they individually want. Noisemakers get the opportunity to be paid to be quiet, and quiet-likers get the opportunity to enjoy peace and quiet for a bit of money.

There's no coercion necessary, although it does rely a bit on geographically local network effects to be useful at all.

Well, if we're willing to go the financial incentives route, we could just slap their ass with a $250 ticket when they ride through town with loud pipes. No need to get all complicated with phone apps and tracking such.

And the "Didn't-Think-This-Through-Did-You" Department asks if one really thinks the Loud Pipes Save Lives and Freeduhm! crowd is going to use a location-tracking app? If the answer is yes, boy, has the head of that department got some bad news for you.

> Well, if we're willing to go the financial incentives route, we could just slap their ass with a $250 ticket when they ride through town with loud pipes.

That is already a thing: https://tiremeetsroad.com/2019/01/07/how-much-are-tickets-fo..., It's just a bit underenforced.

I could see the Harley crowd being reluctant to install such an app, but I could also see it going the other way with the right marketing. After all, your phone already tracks your location and reports it to any company willing to pay. And what if, instead of just cash, the app gave discount points for a local leather chaps store?

It's obviously a problem that affected people have no way to solve this. Authoritarian use of force is one way that might be effective; other ways might be available. I'd be curious to hear some alternative options.

Counter-example:

Sounds are pressure waves that transmit through the air.

Given enough pressure, those waves could even kill someone (bomb).

If we say that there should be no legal limit to sound pressure, then making a bomb explode and killing people should have no legal consequences.

This makes no sense, so we should put a threshold of maximum allowed sound pressure. The discussion now is where is that threshold.

Sometimes outcomes are regulated, not the means of getting to that outcome.

In your case, murder is illegal, but the instrument could be completely legal. For example, water is perfectly legal, although one could force someone to ingest too much water and killing them. It would still be illegal, even though water is legal.

We should still regulate sound levels, mind you.

I mean, you don't need to regulate the maximum pressure, you just need to say "don't kill or injure anyone" right?

You can place the regulation directly on what you want, not just upstream.

Counter-exampe: regulations exist relating to bombs, stabbing, and guns, without having any threshhold of maximum allowed pushing force or speed of matter.

amen

Many most? cities do have noise ordinance laws that would prohibit choppers, but then cops have to decide if that want to take on that battle. Most bikers are super friendly. Some of them are not. One of the biker gangs in my area use a cocktail of drugs that make them fearless, angry, violent and it usually takes half a dozen cops to take down one of the bikers.

It’s not only choppers that are loud.

High RPM street bikes which get “gunned” by their riders are also very loud and more frequent than passé choppers.

sounds like exactly the kind of work cops should be doing

It does, but most cops have spouses and children to go home to. Given options, they will lean towards writing tickets to people less likely to be violent. This is easy to fix and has been fixed in some cities, but then the blowback usually goes the other way. Citizens will complain that the department has been over militarized and will demand the department lose funding until all the military gear has been removed.

You'd think that, but the effort does not always yield the expected results: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/03/709432311/texas-prosecutor-dr...

Harleys stock are actually under the legal noise limit (80 decibels i think?) and are generally that loud due to straight exhaust and a specific cam shaft they use to squeeze more performance out of them. My understanding is folks prefer them to be loud so that they can be better noticed by cars and get hit less often.

Dirt bikes are around 100 decibels, perform like trash and shouldn't be on the freeway near cars in the first place.

Here in Puerto Rico we have herds (20-200) of two stroke bikes that ride together at night for fun. I would gladly trade them for 1000 Harley-Davidsons.

"My understanding is folks prefer them to be loud so that they can be better noticed by cars and get hit less often."

As a member of a motorcycle riding family in the US (I don't ride, but several close family members do) this is hilariously wrong. They like it loud because they like the sound, and they like to get noticed. I say hilariously because I constantly joke with my family members about how silly the bike culture is, and to give full credit to them; they agree.

> like to get noticed

This is a euphemism for "take pleasure in causing physical discomfort to everyone within earshot".

Ha, It did smell like a cop-out when I was told it, but a reasonable enough cop-out that I figured it was at least one form of attention they were after in the process of getting attention from onlookers.

I wouldn't dismiss that claim out of hand.

Whenever I am stuck in stop and go traffic, I can hear/feel lane splitting harleys coming from way behind. Sportbikes just whiz by, making you jump, especially if you were thinking of changing lanes.

I don't believe 'loud pipes save lives' is completely bogus.

If it were really about saving lives, then the rational thing would be to use a safer form of transportation. Hazards like pot holes and debris are unmitigated by the sound of the vehicle, while other types of vehicles can have safety features a bike can't.

That “loud pipes save lives is rubbish” [1]. Even if it were true the ROI on some training and awareness would be far higher.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Do-loud-pipes-really-significantly-sav...

>>ROI on some training and awareness would be far higher.

Motorcycle people generally spend money to placard their cars up with "Watch out for motorcyclists!" stickers so unless you're insinuating the government should use public funds to educate drivers on checking their mirrors and not getting into accidents with motorcyclists I'm not sure what you're actually saying.

Training quantifiably lowers risk - I'm talking about training for motorcyclists. We all have to do some training pretty much everywhere in the world before we become licensed drivers and riders.

In both the UK and US, advanced training courses are available and are recognized my insurance companies who offer discounts.

Anecdotally, the people that I've picked up off the highway have all been on a cruiser-style bike, been wearing improper clothing (usually shorts and T-Shirts) and not been wearing a helmet. Now that's legal here in CO and fine for an individual to make their own decisions. With further training however, you can make better decisions particularly around risk assessment and handling characteristics.

[edit - typo]

OK but individual motorcycle riders are not in a position to train and raise awareness in a way that makes them safe. So from the rider’s perspective, there is no good alternative.

While that may be true there are plenty free or close to free resources on the internet on in libraries and plenty of local friendly groups that often have a focus on advanced riding.

For the folks who are riding around on $20-40k worth of bike with illegal and noisy aftermarket pipes - that they paid for - it's not really an excuse.

It’s not either-or. There are situations where advanced riding will not protect you, but being more noisy will. Plenty of disciplined, advanced riders also choose to be noisier with aftermarket addons, especially on smaller bikes. It’s a trade off that riders make between increasing their safety and being less obnoxious. It’s reasonable as a pedestrian to be annoyed at those that choose the former, but you can’t just dismiss their decision on the grounds that it’s useless- that’s objectively false.

When I used to ride all my problems with other motorists came from people approaching me from behind or to the side, not from me coming up behind people (perhaps because I was not in the habit of lane splitting at every opportunity). I suggest a horn serves the same function without annoying everyone nearby and eventually deafening the rider.

Being heard can help with cars approaching from the side, for example a car moving into your lane while failing to see you.

It’s not a silver bullet but it’s one more layer of safety and I don’t understand why that statement is so controversial? I’m not even advocating for these after-market mods (I don’t use one) just pointing out that there is in fact a tradeoff.

Now, some riders just like being loud for the sake of it, and that is a whole different story.

If “loud pipes save(d) lives”, your insurance company would give a discount for straight pipes. Instead they give a discount if you’ve taken a training course and have ABS. It is bullshit spouted by man-children that just want to attract attention, dishonestly disguised as a safety issue.

This is a very good point. In fact, I'd imagine insurance companies would actually be very interested to know that a bike is being ridden with illegal modifications...

> folks prefer them to be loud so that they can be better noticed by cars and get hit less often

If you want to do something that’s too dangerous to do without infuriating everyone around you, maybe you just shouldn’t do it.

I don’t think those super loud exhausts are stock either. There are tons of bikers who replace the stock pipes with the loudest ones they can find. I don’t get it at all.

Motorcycles reduce congestion and emit less carbon emissions than SUVs, sedans, trucks, etc. Sure, loud exhausts shouldn't be used, but banning them without addressing the problem of incompetent drivers only further encourages a bygone car culture that is already arguably too pervasive in our society.

As a side note, this line of thinking "[it infuriates others so] maybe you shouldn't do it" leans totalitarian which in turn leads to suboptimal outcomes (since no one person or even organization knows the optimal way of living or organizing society -- e.g. no mortals can play "god" so to speak). Also, many people are "infuriated" by trivial things, so it's not always a good way to live life imagining who these ambiguous others are and also to placate to their imagined sensibilities.

I'm not suggesting a ban on motorcycles. I'm a motorcyclist myself but I use the stock exhausts because they are quiet. I do want to ban excessively loud exhausts, or more simply, I want the police to enforce the existing noise pollution laws.

I think that an important part of being a decent human being living in close proximity to other human beings is recognizing and limiting one's own anti-social behavior. I hope that's not a controversial statement.

Agreed on the loud exhaust ban, thanks for clarifying

>emit less carbon emissions than SUVs, sedans, trucks, etc.

Citation needed. I'd be willing to bet money that a honda civic has fewer emissions than a harley.

I think you're right about the straight pipes being after market, but I believe the noise generally comes from the engine configuration firing at uneven intervals that make it unusually distinct.

While they are under the legal noise limit, the low frequency of harleys travels significantly easier through obstacles, making them seem louder inside a house or around a wall / fence / bush than a higher frequency noise at the same dB.

I'm definitely not arguing that 2-stroke is quieter though. Just that it's not quite an apples to apples comparison due to both variables having an impact.

For around a year I lived next to a highway, which was one of the worst rental decisions I've made in my life.

There was a constant stream of noise, but with the cars it wasn't a big problem, because it was the same volume all the time, so I quickly got used to it. Motorcycles though were a huge issue! Every 10-15 minutes there was some motorcycle passing that just distracted me from whatever I was doing. I left that apartment as soon as I could.

There’s some asshole in my apartment complex who decided a car with an engine with a startup sound very similar loudness to a passing motorcycle. I just love walking outside to be greeted by that.

The one thing that makes me even angrier is gas-powered leaf blowers that make multiple passes past my apartment, and seemingly deliberately linger for longer if I'm in the middle of a conference call.

Seriously, go electric and ban those abominations.

They are also hugely polluting, more than cars and trucks: https://www.wsj.com/articles/that-ear-splitting-leaf-blower-...

I would be ecstatic if my city banned leaf blowers.

They might already be—I lived in a city where they were “banned.” And yet I never saw a landscaper using an electric blower; they were always gas.

Warsaw banned them recently. Luckily the authorities started doing something about this nuisance...

A guy that lived on the street down from mine used to ride his about at night, made my house shake. Was so happy when he seemed to move away.

I think this is just not a concern for the general population. There are solutions available if we wanted to address this issue.

There could be a restriction on the vehicle. Some European cities have zones with restricted access to vehicles based on their CO2 emissions. There are stickers that you have to put on your windshield to drive into those areas.

We could have some "noise emission" regulations that ban some vehicles from driving at certain times, like before 9am or after 7pm.

It would be similar to the CO2 emission regulations, there's no need to measure the emissions because you have a sticker that already say what your emission levels are.

Hard to enforce those in the US

We could make re-registering more difficult or impossible for people with addresses in areas with those kind of ordinances

Enthusiasts will have nominal addresses but it can be a deterrent

And the people riding them use earplugs :)

https://www.alpinehearingprotection.com/earplugs/motosafe-pr...

Not for the pipes though. Most riders wear ear plugs for wind noise and traffic noise at highway speed.

They just sound like someone ripping ass to me. Never understood the obsessions with their awful noise. It's not a good exhaust tone at all.

if the typical biker was a 24 year old hispanic man, they would be outlawed before you could say "ay caramba". Instead, boomers and genx white guys get a pass.

Loud sounds are annoying to be sure, but this sounds also like a bit of an emotional regulation issue in addition, especially if just writing a comment about the event is enraging you.

Stressing about that kind of stuff that you ultimately have little/no control over is an express train to an unhappy life.

There might be some truth to this, though I don't know whether we have conscious control of it.

There's some evidence to suggest magnesium deficiency can lead to an increase in startle response.

you have no idea. i can even sympathize with a murderer. you know, self-defense, impulse... can be anything. but this? this is premediated. just one asshat can ruin entire town. these people deserve lifetime-imprisonment after multiple offence.

> these people deserve lifetime-imprisonment after multiple offence.

You can't be serious when you say that you'd lock someone in a cage for the rest of their life because they broke a noise ordinance.

Anyone could break a noise ordinance inadvertently, eg having a party that went on too long or getting carried away on a DIY project. while I'm not endorsing the life imprisonment proposal, deliberately altering your vehicle to make it loud and obnoxious (or plain noxious, as with 'coal roller' pickups that are modified to belch oily smoke in large quantities) is a calculated kind of sadism that exploits the inconvenience and low probability of enforcement to aggravate others to the greatest extent possible.

I get where you're coming from, but I also believe that loud pipes save lives. Ultimately, is it really that big of a deal?

Is riding motorcycles really that important if it causes noise pollution and enrages people?

Inflicting hearing loss on the unconsenting public is a huge deal.

Denying others sleep is kind of a big deal.