Some cars are loud because people want them to be, most cars are loud because the noise the tires make when driving is loud, and that only gets worse the more cars you have around.
It only takes one engine in a thousand to drown out everything else. They are specifically designed to produce a "note" and explosions which are highly irregular and impossible to not hear.
Loud engines should be repaired if possible and destroyed if not. But total road noise should also be taken into account and accounted for with increased vehicle tax.
A car going 50km/h+ is on some sort of a highway, where noise and pollution are less relevant. It's the cars going <50km/h on residential streets that cause problems.
Empirically, engine noise dominates then. The difference between ICEs and EVs passing by is staggeringly obvious.
Turns out when you design a road for high-speed driving, people will drive fast on it.
True, I live by a 60km/h road (so everyone drives 80km/h at least) and I have been noticing that EV's are just as loud as ICE cars. The only difference is the ICE's have an additional tone to them, but that doesn't make them much louder to me, just different. However the real issue is motorbikes and mopeds which don't have any exhaust dampening (or removed it).
Actually, wait, there is one asshole on a scooter who locks his wheels & creates incredible shrieking horror "omg an accident is happening" sounds at every intersection he stops at. But that too is not regular tire noise, it's another boy child antisocial asshole.
There's different situations. Sometimes yes tire noise is an issue. The video has one of my favorite bits, 'why did this not take off? Because car makers are assholes' or some such. The aggregate noise can be a problem. But I think the video is spot on. Car drivers don't have any conception of how fucking obnoxious to hundreds of people it is that they blow their horn. They love shitty preening pathetic loud cars. It's only like 10% of them, but those 10% of car drivers are anti social assholes with enormous ability to make life much worse for everyone. And most societies have almost no restraints, no ability to create counter pressures against the anti-social.
That's not a difficult problem (except in cases like sloped terrain etc.) - and the solutions are known and readily available. They are not even expensive, socially. The problem is:
1. Increasing awareness and understanding of the alternative and the solutions available to get there.
2. Translating public interest/will into political action by municipal administrative bodies.
3. Rearrangement of resources away from private expenditure on cars and their maintenance, and national expenditure on roads, into municipal (and perhaps national) expenditure on mass transit systems.
... and these problems, or at least their combination, is what's difficult.
A 6 lane or 8 lane highway is like a big chemical plant. You wouldn’t want that in your neighborhood or near your city. It’s a big industrial site.
A tree-lined road with protected bike lanes, sidewalks, cars parked on either side, and a 20 mph speed limit is like a nice coffee shop just a few blocks from your house. It’s like a small business. You do want those in your neighborhood.
The long march of time will remove car-only infrastructure because it can't outlast economic physics, but we should do it faster to limit the damage and save hydrocarbons for spaceships and medicine and stuff.
Unfortunately we won't have our Triangle Shirt Factory or smog prevalence to really put the problem in your face. If we put some sort of coloring in car exhaust so you had to see it we'd ban cars within a year.
We don't need to come up with solutions. Countries around the world have already. Some of the larger cities in the USA have started making these changes and seeing results.
The solutions don't need to be comprehensive. While an accepted comprehensive plan maybe nice it does put all the planning up front and makes the projects take a very long time. Doing small things that push people to take other transport options doesn't need to take forever. As many cities demonstrated during the pandemic.
In the USA I think the biggest issue will be political will. But the one thing I'd like to see take off is cities removing parking minimums for new businesses or construction. The minimums were arbitrarily set and stop people from building small businesses. The parking minimums spread things out and drive the need to do something other than walk. Strong Towns has a video on it that does a better job than I can.
In short I believe comprehensive guide to being to reduce cars in cities exist at this point.
The biggest issue in the US is the will to change things. As you've mentioned, during the pandemic, we've seen how rapidly things can change when everyone is aligned in one direction. Whether you agree with those changes or not the fact is many cities had al fresco dining , and portions of streets reclaimed for it in as little as a year.
Another interesting observation I've had about the US is that commercial space for rent always tends to look way larger than it needs to be! Instead of subdividing a space and cutting the rent potentially in half many commercial units are huge and I can only imagine the rent is so high that only the big chains can afford to rent them.
Of course this also means that things tend to be a little less quaint and walkable, because instead of having 2/3 small businesses you have a massive chain in it's space.
I live in a fairly walkable area in Los Angeles (go figure right?) and I can't tell you the amount of giant open commercial / retail spaces I see that have been dormant for quite a while. I can't help but think I'd they were to slice up the space they would be filled in no time.
1) Harley's with open pipes 2) cars without any exhaust (common) 3) after market exhaust on import cars (thanks Fast & Furious) 4) garbage trucks, gas powered gardening equipment, 4x4's/big trucks, new muscle cars 5) scooters, mopeds, gas powered bicycles, motocross motorcycles (I get sideshows/giant groups driving up/down my street to the next location), enduro & regular motorcycles
The thing is is that there are already laws in place to deal with most of those..
There are non trivial problems to solve with EV in the city. Solve those instead of propping up age of fire dinosaur juice machines.
No “car guy” is impressed by a busted up 20 year old BMW 318i with a popcorn tune, straight pipes, and rep wheels, but there’s a lot of barely 20-somethings who think it’s cool yet don’t know the first thing about how cars work.
There's a bunch of various things "kids these days are doing" because of social media and their craving of attention, that are frankly completely stupid and objectively bad, but get them attention due to being obnoxious. Carolina squat, stance, and popcorn tunes all fall into this category. Stance kids in particular /know/ they're doing something objectively stupid and dangerous and respond by putting "locally hated" stickers on their car. There's a lot of kids, especially in the West, without good family life and too much exposure to social media who will do anything, no matter how obnoxious or objectively wrong, to get attention, even negative attention. This is just how it extends to cars. We all hope they grow out of it, because otherwise they're destined to be wastes of the oxygen they're breathing.
What is wrong with people?
If 50 years ago, cities prioritized travel methods for walking and biking, the noise pollution this video describes wouldn’t be so prevalent.
One is that we need to come up with comprehensive solutions for reducing the number of vehicles in use. But that’s a difficult problem where solutions take decades and must be tailored to each scenario.
But what can be addressed now is the engine and exhaust sound levels. Some vehicles are loud because their engines are working hard, but many vehicles are loud because people (boys) want them to be loud. For some reason there is a large percentage of people who equate loud with good or cool.
Some of these unnecessarily loud vehicles are so loud that your home windows will rattle when they drive by. The worst are the Harley style motorcycles, but some crappy two stroke scooters can also be deafeningly loud.
Ironically, there is even an electric car in my village that makes a noise (to improve pedestrian safety), but the noise is so loud that it sounds like a street sweeper vehicle vacuuming the road.
Meanwhile, in this “peaceful” village I live in, there is always someone with some lawn or other machine making loud noise.
Essentially, noise is just another form of pollution that some people assume is unavoidable and just accept while others revel in producing.
Imagine buying aftermarket parts so your car would spew oil around it as you drive. Then imagine being proud because of how much oil your vehicle sprayed. It’s absurd, but it’s the same thing with boys and their loud toys.