Cities aren't loud, cars (and trucks) are loud

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

Video discusses this thoroughly. There ARE quiet cities amazingly enough. And suburbs are a HUGE source of the noise IN the cities they surround because it's the car traffic from suburbs into the cities that makes much of the noise.

Cities ARE loud, but they don't HAVE to be.

How about the non-stop construction and non-stop road work? How about clubs and bars with outdoor speakers? Helicopters, industrial cooling/HVAC. I could go on. It's far more than just cars. What are these quiet cities that magically have none of these things?

I never noticed, walking around the nicer European cities, that any of those things made nearly the same level of noise as the cars. Seriously, walk through Paris or something and tell me that clubs and bars and helicopters and AC are even nearly as loud as the cars when you walk next to a busy road.

I can't think of an exception to this in any city I've been in, honestly. Which cities have lots of clubs and bars with loud speakers out the front? Is that common in the states?

Try the less nice ones then.

In terms of decibels cars are indeed louder. But not all noise is created equal.

I have noise-cancelling headphones - they do a great job removing white noise(so traffic, among others), but aren't too effective against sounds with a more focused spectrum like people yelling in the middle of the night, bottles being broken or trash being collected in the middle of the night.

I...have walked around the less nice parts of Paris? I'm not sure what your point is. In the less nice parts of Paris, the noisy areas are still mostly the areas with busy roads. It's simply the biggest source of noise pollution in cities and I haven't found anything that comes close. Maybe in specific areas you can find people playing obnoxiously loud music with helicopters buzzing over constantly but that's certainly a very specific and hopefully rare set of circumstances. The same with yelling and crime and so on. If that's the default in your city I'd agree you have vastly greater problems than the sound of cars.

Not much a problem in my city, but those which I've been to that are seen as "walkable" and with a "vibrant city life". Essentially all places with considerable tourist traffic.

Paris is very densely populated - I'm surprised anyone attempts to drive there, because at these densities and distance between buildings it must be horrible.

My point is: it's not that clear cut. Removing cars is what makes places like Paris bearable, but the problem lies in the sheer population density that a truly walkable city over a certain scale requires.

I moved to a city that has 2/3 the population density of my previous location and even though it's just swamped with traffic, it's actually quieter on average.

I feel like population density is completely left out of the conversation. From my experience there's a middle ground between car-oriented suburbs and human pile-ups like Paris(or other cities approaching this density) which is rarely explored.

I certainly would agree that Paris isn't an ideal city. My experience has been that cities with 1-2 million inhabitants with reasonable, but not extreme, density (i.e. much denser than suburbia but less dense than Paris) have been the most pleasant.

Some of Paris is nice, quiet, leafy arrondissements. Quite a lot is not.

That's not my point. My point is that the noisy parts are the parts with cars, and the areas without many cars do not have anything approaching the noise levels of busy roads. I am aware that not all of Paris is quiet and leafy...

Miami, NYC, LA to name a few. And it's far more prevalent now since covid as most places have some outdoor seating now and they've seemingly all installed speakers.

It's banned in all Polish cities I've been to. And for a good reason.

Half the problems with America seems to be lack of regulation and the assumption that it can't be changed :)

America fascinates me because half of the time things are functionally unregulated, and the other half of the time there's a law about Kinder Eggs and the exact height your lawn must be.

We're playing Call of Cthulhu pen&paper RPG campaign set in modern USA. Our DM has to check the laws in each state often, and usually it derails the session by how completely absurd it is.

Like our party was able to carry a bazooka around openly in one state :)

Was that Old Man Henderson? https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDGreentext/comments/2hpuvq/old_ma...

I'd be careful extrapolating too much from a literal reading of state laws.

The HN demographics would regulate things to the point of absurdity if left to their own devices. In the US they only reach critical mass to do so in affluent suburbs, so you get stupid local laws about lawn height and other attempts at legislating conformity. Occasionally they get thrown a bone by the federal bureaucracies or legislators on some meaningless issue that nobody will care enough to oppose. This is how you get lawn darts and random food products effectively banned (not that lobbying doesn't also result in odd small things being banned too).

I don't know what the demographics of HN are, but while reading this I had similar sentiment. I don't like having to hear leaf blowers, but I really don't like other ppl telling me I can't use one. All regulations have a cost; I think I just weigh the cost more heavily in principle than many folks here.

Things like leaf blowers have solutions between "Wild West v8 supercharged beasts" and "every leaf must be hand picked up by your current cadre of indentured servants".

A perfectly practical solution would be for the town to designate "outdoor power equipment times" such as "Saturday, 10-4" or "any day, 10-12, 3-4" or similar.

Electric is helping but even then there's noise created from just the action of the device, and you also reach a paradox where as things get quieter the remaining noise sources become more annoying.

There's a very simple solution. Include externalities in the prices. Most people won't be able to pay for gas, problem fixed.

Pretty hard to price negative effects of noise pollution into fuel prices though, since it includes long term health, as well as property values and other things with massive confounders.

You can measure it. Find N pairs of regions where all factors except for noise pollution are similar, measure price of land differences, average them. You have the cost of noise pollution.

That's unfortunate, and definitely sounds like a problem that should be dealt with. For whatever reason the same thing didn't happen in Australian cities which are structurally quite similar to North American cities so it's not inevitable.

> What are these quiet cities that magically have none of these things?

There is no magic, just legal regulation and it just works. Switzerland and Japan are good examples.

As the video I posted mentions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

The Dutch city of Delft in particular is just intentionally designed to care about noise. Both design and regulations. Turns out that when you simply prioritize reducing noise, it's actually doable. And it's still a city, albeit a modest-sized small city, not a major regional hub or a global-level metropolis. But the lessons can be applied anywhere.

And electric vehicles are a lot less so.

Everytime I get passed by an e-bike my brain has a little pleasure seizure from not having to suffer the expected rawkus.

vehicles are make noise with the engine and wheels, so light electric vehicles are super quiet, but heavy vehicles tend to be loud regardless when moving fast

Electric cars are certainly far from silent, and somewhere at the high end of city speeds they are hard to distinguish from other cars because most of the sound comes from the tires.

But subjectively I don't mind the tire noise nearly as much as the sound of an accelerating petrol engine.

When I’m walking next to a busy road (which the only two multiuse pathways near me are next to), it’s quite loud and most of the noise is tire noise. (To the point where you have to shout to have a conversation with someone walking with you.) Those trails would be much more pleasant without the cars there, electric or not.

It all sucks. High pitched tire wine, unbalanced thumps. Diesel engines are the worst.

True, but tire noise is sort of proportional to both weight and speed and electric vehicles are on average heavier due to huge batteries. So a fully electrified city would have a very different noise profile but not necessarily quieter or louder.

Fair point

I am dreading an EV dystopia where all vehicles are going slow enough to create a cacophony from the mandated low-speed sounds.

It would sound like something out of a William Gibson novel.

I apologize if this is a silly question but is that currently mandated or is this something that will likely be mandated when the EVs become dominant? My impression was that they are currently relatively silent but that might just because they are always in proximity to a combustion engine idling next to them.

Currently mandated - newer electric cars make this noise that I would put somewhere between "future theremin"[1] and "terrifying alien chorus."[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qe1wuDsXVk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvX7NnlhiOE

Bonus: Kia's sounds like an ambient synth track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdZwVJPN0Ow

There are electric school buses in my area that emit the sound of the Montreal Metro when driving at low speeds:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu_1JM_UiuA

This is because the manufacturer is based in Quebec.

it's worth testing indeed, that said these car sounds are under control, not impossible that in slow dense urban spot you can lower them

Not true at all.

Currently live in a dense city in Asia. Remove all the personal vehicles and it would still be noisy as hell. Just business vehicles delivering food, removing trash, etc. are a decent amount of noise. The high building density reflects and concentrates the noise.

Then add in construction, road work. Even the worker moving trash bins around by hand every evening is loud.

Pure fantasy to have dense city living an little noise.

Sure, but neither do suburbs. You could mandate everyone drive electric vehicles with tires optimized for low road noise.

Tesla going 90 km/h is almost as noisy as regular car going 90 km/h. Engine noise only dominates at low speeds.

1. Notice I said tires optimized for road noise. 2. Most suburban homes in the US are far enough from roads with 55 mph speed limits that high speed road noise isn’t penetrating the home.

And most residential areas in cities have a 25-30mpg speed limit

And what is the speed limit right outside your house/apartment?

On small roads between the blocks ("strefa zamieszkania") it's 20 km/h. Also pedestrians have right of way over cars on these roads everywhere, no matter the crossings. Usually these roads are made of bricks and have these "bumps" so you won't go much faster even if you wanted to. That's the closest road to me (like 50 meters from my flat).

On regular roads it's 50 km/h. There's one like 300 meters from my flat.

On a few big multilane roads it's 90 km/h or more but the closest such road is 700 meters from my flat, and it has these noise-cancelling panels around it.

It's worth adding that 90%+ of Polish drivers ignore speed limits...There's hardly any police or speeding cameras (apart from a few selected areas which everyone knows about, and does not speed there), so the speed limits really work on sort of "opt-in" basis.

Eh, sure, but on the local "strefa zamieszkania" nobody goes over 30 km/h. You hardly can go faster there.

Well, given that the whole suburban sprawl style is also financially reckless and unsustainable, the answer is to get rid of car-dependent style of development and life entirely, not just tweak it by going for electric cars.

It's funny how my brain reacts to all caps very similarly as if someone is literally shouting in front of me during a conversation. Must be the decades of internet forums and emails.

The first time you shouted my eye was twitching. By the third time I could almost feel a stroke coming from the increase in noise pollution.

Humans are so susceptible... pfff

It does sound ridiculous but I’ve lived in DC, London, and SF now and all were quieter than the suburbs I’ve lived in.

Mostly because of lawn stuff and garbage pickup. Also probably a factor that I’ve been in new city buildings with good insulation and not on the ground floor.

If the insulation isn’t the same, you can’t really compare the 2. I could take a nap in an active construction site with good enough earplugs.

Garbage pickup is once a week, and the truck is close enough for me to hear it for maybe 15 minutes. Double that for recycling pickup.

I live a few miles from the city center, in just about the densest area where people still have lawns. There are maybe 5 houses close enough to me that I could hear a leaf blower from if I’m inside the house (loud enough to notice). Even if each one runs a lawnmower and leaf blower for half an hour each week, that’s 2.5 hours per week tops (only 2 of them actually use leaf blowers, and most only cut the grass 1x every 2 weeks). Also in most of the country mowing only happens a little more than half the year.

Compare that with road noise, and sirens, which I hear far more often.

> Garbage pickup is once a week, and the truck is close enough for me to hear it for maybe 15 minutes. Double that for recycling pickup.

Around me, there are three different recycling pickups (one for the each kind of recyclable). Combined with regular trash pickup, it means that the garbage truck is here on most work days.

That's definitely not the norm in the US. A quick google search shows that less than 1/3 of US houses have access to curb side recycling at all, much less weekly recycling for extra items like glass.

Insulation is a huge factor - up north the sounds are as present but much less noticeable because the houses have to be insulated, and have double-pane windows.

Down in San Diego the noises are much MORE noticeable because many houses have poor or no insulation at all, and the windows are single pane (or open).

IMO it's more that the city sounds all blend together into one harmonious cacophony, whereas in the suburbs, it's mostly quite except for that one incredibly loud, obnoxious sound. Always Sunny has a great episode about this.

I don’t doubt that people are more likely to notice sounds in the suburbs because they aren’t habituated to them. But saying the suburbs are louder is like saying it’s actually quieter to live next to a gun range than it is to live next to the woods, because when the occasional hunter fires his gun you are more likely to notice it.

I lived on a 10 acre plot in the US northeast for a while, in a cozy cabin. I had the best neighbor, and old guy who owned the 200 acres mostly around me and let me hike around on it. He eventually died and some dipshit CEO of a healthcare company bought the place, logged most of it, and then gave it to his kids, a teenager and 20-something, both boys. The kids would come up all the damn time and drive their lifted trucks, quads and unmuffled motorbikes with their friends all night long, and then shoot all afternoon and night. It was way outside city limits so anything goes. Of course I tried talking to them, and they just thought I was some loser old guy trying to stop their fun, and their dad simply didn't give a fuck. There was no way the tiny police department that we shared with a neighboring town would even care.

I eventually moved because they ruined my peace and quiet, and because I was getting sick of the 5' snow drifts starting in October.

There’s really not that much road noise in a lot of cities unless you live near a couple of particularly busy streets.

The study I linked showed that on average there is.

Yeah, 50 years ago when there was 120 million less people in the United States and households were bigger yet had smaller houses/lots and owned a single vehicle. Power lawn equipment was more expensive back then too - most of my family used push mowers up until the 90s.

# vehicle/person probably doubled since then.

So, I'll agree that suburbs are likely quieter than the city, but those particular items definitely vary by city and neighborhood.

I live in the densest neighborhood in Austin (West Campus). Sirens are rare, and car horns are moderately uncommon. Construction noise is near-constant during the day, as are big trucks related to the construction. Car noise is ever-present, but more of a problem on the larger roads. (I'm currently sitting outside a coffee shop on Lamar and the traffic noise is indeed constant and terrible.)

The two biggest sources of noise pollution in my neighborhood are 1. the construction and 2. leaf blowers. Leaf blowers might be third if you split the construction-related trucks into their own category.

Cities aren't inherently louder than countryside. Car traffic is noisy, but the volume is proportional to the speed. Cars going 30 km/h aren't THAT noisy. You don't hear them through the windows. Cars going 90 km/h are VERY noisy and at that point it doesn't matter if they are electric or not - you mostly hear the tires and the aerodynamics.

Using car horns at cities is forbidden anyway, unless there's a crash or a dangerous situation you shouldn't hear them. I can't remember the last time I've heard a car horn in my city.

I've lived in countryside and in several places in 2 different big cities in Poland, and except for one time I lived near a big 4-lane road in the middle of the city (which is a disgrace of communist urban planning BTW) - cities were quieter than the countryside.

Cars are going faster in the countryside and dogs are constantly barking at night at anything that moves.

BTW another factor is windows quality. It significantly changes how quiet your home is.

We moved to a townhouse 2km from the city centre after living 15km outside the city and the difference in noise is staggering. We had a mildly trafficked 70km/h road about 150m from our house (with a property in between) and the noise from that road was more or less constant. We could hear cars from almost a kilometre away over the open fields, so one car per minute meant almost constant noise.

Now we live in a not-so-popular area built during a great housing programme in the 60s ("miljonprogrammet" in Swedish) and we love it. Lots of green areas, all parking is in the outer perimeter so we have almost no traffic. The modern areas built in town are nowhere near as well planned from a life quality perspective.

I am not anonymous (nor even pseudonymous) here, so I might as well mention that the area is Vilbergen in the city of Norrköping.

That sounds great. I hate cars and traffic and trains.

All else being equal, more people = more noise.

Since all else isn’t equal, you could design cities that are quieter than the most suburbs. But you could also design suburbs that are quieter than most cities.

In the US at least I linked a study that showed cities are far louder on average.

You cannot have significantly more people/square meter with everything else remaining equal. Cities are like stars - quantitative change in density causes qualitative change in behavior.

Once you have density high enough you can't live in separate houses. People move to commieblocks or other kinds of multitenant buildings. This shifts everything closer together, makes public transport profitable and having a car becomes optional. These kinds of neighborhoods are quieter than the countryside usually. It looks like this: https://spoldzielnialsm.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Obecni... https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ud9-Z0UHVHg/W7-qUjfNT9I/AAAAAAAAi...

Or if you're insane you can mandate enough parking space that this doesn't happen and instead you have highrises in the sea of parking lots.

round me its just leaf blowers for ~4 hours everyday a few months a year

Its really annoying for WFH

Lawns—especially front lawns—are connected to a weirdly-large number of problems in the US, when you think about it. Noise pollution, excessive water use, more driving (all those barely-used front lawns take up a ton of space, which pushes everything farther apart by a significant distance). Fuel use and air pollution (mowing, trimming, those damn leaf blowers—though at least some of this is going electric).

> Lawns—especially front lawns—are connected to a weirdly-large number of problems in the US

Adding to that list: The poisoning of every downstream waterway for miles. The further south you go, the worse it is.

Oh yeah, good point. And since they're manicured and sprayed with all kinds of pesticides (and lots of fertilizer, which contributes to the downstream poisoning you note) they're not even helpful for any kind of preservation of natural life. They'd like some kind of taxidermied version of a healthy natural environment.

Driveways can, admittedly, be handy but you don't need a whole lawn for that. Just turn the driveway sideways and butt the whole thing up against the road. Boom, just as much parking and space for trailers or cleaning your boat or whatever, and you can cut out a few meters of lot depth with minimal loss of functionality. Of course, building codes mandate lawns, so that can't happen. Meanwhile I dream of a world where everything's ~10% closer just because we don't have suburban front lawns.

I also sometimes wonder how many amazing parks we could have if half the money everyone put into maintaining their front lawns went to that, instead. Put half the money and half the land into that and we could have an awesome park on every other suburban block, and still save money and space.

I've always found cars to be much more disruptive in the suburbs because they drive so much faster in the suburbs. Cars drive by a suburban sandwich shop that I like to go to so fast that they shake windows. The speed limit on the road is 25.