Probably a gearhead showing his personal bias.

The really frustrating thing is I love cars. I love driving, I love shifting though the gears, I love working on them, I've replaced headgaskets, rebuilt transmissions, and regeared differentials. I just hate how obnoxious noisy vehicles are.

For sure - I love speed myself. (Ironic that my fastest car ever is also the quietest, but EVs are a different creature). I guess not everyone has the same ethos that our personal enjoyment doesn't entitle us to encroach on others.

This. More so for loud motorcycles, since cops tend to also own them.

This logic is absurd. Cops are hands off with bikers not because they own bikes. Extrapolating your logic one could say:

Cops don’t ticket cars because they also own a car

Cops don’t stop people with guns because they also own guns

Cops don’t go after bikers because they factor in if the offense is worth the risk, to both themselves and the public. There’s also a whole thing with outlaw motorcycle gangs that plays into it. Most non entry level bikes can out maneuver and outrun cop cars with ease, yes, even those slow looking Harley’s. Starting a chase over loud pipes would put a lot of innocent people at risk and for what? It isn’t worth it and it’s safe to say if the biker is running modified pipes they are not on an entry level bike.

Story: a buddy of mine had a gsxr 1000 and would purposely screw with cops on the freeway and as soon as they’d light up he’d be gone and doing 200mph within a few seconds, fitting between cars easily. Within 30-60 seconds a bike can be damn near a mile away from a cop car. Radioing ahead won’t help if you don’t know where they went and they were never running a plate to run… most cops know it’s pointless to chase and often immediately call it off. Public safety is more important. Those types of bikers have a way of making the issue go away all on their own eventually. You can’t temp fate that much and not eventually meet yours.

Grappling hook through the front wheel fixes that right away...

So we should kill people for loud exhausts? What about the innocent bystander the bike turns into jelly when it is catapulted into the air and lands on them? That energy has to go somewhere…

Ya know, part of the reason cops should enforce the laws on the books is to keep people from going all Batman when they get tired of lawlessness.

Yes because Americans all over are going vigilante and taking justice into their own hands. What world are you living in? The America I live in everyone is too chicken shit to handle things for themselves and when I get to that point I’m not thinking about grappling hooks and going after people with loud exhausts…

Well, you're the one talking about a friend who takes many lives into his hands by doing this, so it's not about "loud exhausts." It's about someone who thinks so little of his own and others' lives that he'd be doing 200mph on a crowded public highway. Pretty much the definition os "reckless indifference to human life."

>> Story: a buddy of mine had a gsxr 1000 and would purposely screw with cops on the freeway and as soon as they’d light up he’d be gone and doing 200mph within a few seconds, fitting between cars easily. Within 30-60 seconds a bike can be damn near a mile away from a cop car. Radioing ahead won’t help if you don’t know where they went and they were never running a plate to run… most cops know it’s pointless to chase and often immediately call it off.

>doing 200mph within a few seconds

It's still kind of amazing to me that race-tuned liter bikes are even legal in the US. Even a starter 250 likely has a faster 0-60 than most cars on the road. I believe you need a little extra power to spare when riding, so that you can suddenly speed up if you need to, but not so much extra power that a quarter-turn on the throttle gets you from 70 to 100 MPH in 1 second.

I've heard big bikes described as "ride to survive" because even a small mistake can be fatal when you are dealing with that much performance. Full disclosure, I ride a big, fat Kawasaki touring bike (1993 ZG1200, right about 760 pounds wet) and while the engine is big, it's geared to a max of 113 MPH. It's big enough I have to respect it when riding, but powerful enough that if I need to I can spur it a bit :)

I’ve had a Honda cbr and I’ve been into modified tuner cars my whole life. I have much more experience going fast in cars than on bikes. Everything becomes much bigger at higher speeds. You learn pretty quickly that when you’re doing 150 you don’t make jerky movements with the steering wheel. Tiny, tiny, fluid movements are amplified to become more. You need to anticipate understeer and be able to feel when the ass end is getting squirrelly or is breaking loose. You learn to use the engine compression as a brake assist when trying to slow that mass by 80mph in a 100 foot span. I’m guilty of doing obnoxious and deadly things on the highway in my various drift cars over the years and that’s more than enough for me. I had my bike up to 120 when I owned it and decides squiding out wasn’t something I wanted to risk. The shit I do in cars is more than enough to get the devil looking my way.

Interestingly enough I passed a cop on the highway doing 150 once. He was merging on from the on ramp. I stayed in it thinking I was fucked anyway but to my surprise he took the very next exit and got right back off the highway. There’s no way he didn’t notice me blow past him. The only thing I can think of is he got a priority call or he saw my speed and said fuck this my shift is about over and noped on out of running me down.

> Story: a buddy of mine had a gsxr 1000 and would purposely screw with cops on the freeway ... You can’t temp fate that much and not eventually meet yours.

An idiot friend used to do similar (in the UK), then one day he did it and the Police turned up at his house 1 minute after he had stopped and put his bike away. He'd gotten away with it loads of times but this time he did it with a Police helicopter in the air less than a mile away and easily able to track a bike all the way back to his house. A top sports bike may be able to do 200mph but not everywhere, and helicopters are fast, can see for miles with very good tracking cameras, and can fly in straight lines.

They then used all of the footage from the Police cars of previous incidents to tie them all to him (similar clothing, similar bespoke exhaust, etc). I think he got 8 years in prison with all of the totting up that went on (and previous offences taken into account).

Then you have the video of the challenger hellcat outrunning a helicopter...

https://youtu.be/W9eLpH513po?si=e2vfe_ntQSkduewW

Interesting link, that said:

A video that opens from a news helicopter and a reporter stating "we've been tracking him for ten minutes" that continues to track for another 3 or four minutes.

The police helicopter pulls off towards the end for lack of fuel .. and the news helicopter says that they are having trouble keeping up (despite having done so for at least 13 minutes).

I'm going to guess this is more a resources ran out thing than a car outran helicopter thing.

( FWiW "The speed of a police helicopter can vary depending on the make and model. However, most police helicopters have a top speed of around 130-145 miles per hour (209-233 kilometers per hour)."

The car was peaking at 110 mph, the helicopters may have been hitting headwinds, even so the statement was explicit that police helicopter had low fuel. )

The police rig was probably easily keeping up - but was low on fuel, the news helicopter likely had less grunt and|or started to exceed budget burn rate | run low on fuel itself.

The follow through on that wasn't given but there's a fair chance the car was tracked down - being distinctive and the police capturing the plates.

I agree with your analysis but they do state they are using a powerful lens to even get that footage and then further on....

3:20ish "We're having trouble keeping up with this guy"

3:30 "We are currently going 120MPG and he is losing us. We're at the maximum speed right now." [news anchor after speaking to pilot]

3:50 "This is the first time the vehicle has outrun the chopper" [studio host?]

So I think you are correct in the 130-145 MPH max speed and them just hitting 120 due to wind or hardware.

I am in favor of louder pipes for motorcycles for safety reasons. But there is such a thing as too loud.

not sure the safety argument has factual support; the sound would need to project forward from the motorcycle, wouldn't it?

hmmm, if I have to hear the noise, I would like a requirement that it blare forward! (so I can step into the crosswalk)

If noise made your bike safer, you’d get an insurance discount. People say such things so that they don’t come off as sociopathic, not because it is true. Don’t parrot them.

So should every pedestrian have a blazing siren on their head?

Pedestrians should not be on the road.

No, cars should not be on the road.

Roads were built for cars.

That's not actually the case in many places in the US, they were forcibly taken for cars in the same way electric streetcar systems were taken from us:

> Before the American city could be physically reconstructed to accommodate automobiles, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where cars belong [..] Until then, streets were regarded as public spaces, where practices that endangered or obstructed others (including pedestrians) were disreputable. Motorists’ claim to street space was therefore fragile, subject to restrictions that threatened to negate the advantages of car ownership.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/

Coming up with a fact that roads existed in the ancient times is not a gotcha. Most of the roads today did not exist back then. 99% of the roads I have driven on did not exist before cars.

Crosswalks

Crossing the road is different from what is being discussed which is riding along side cars.

safer for whom? My windows only rattle after the motorcycle has driven past, they don't project the noise ahead of you nearly as much as you think they do.

If you are riding on the highway going the same speed as other cars, it is often hard for them to see you, but if they can hear you they know you are there. It isn’t about driving past.

Which is the same reason every biker with loud pipes wears a full high-vis outfit.

Or maybe they're just assholes.

Most of them are assholes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not safer to be louder.

It's just the odd love of the Harley or similar.

I got pulled over for noise (in the UK) as my ZX6-R had a hole in the downpipes and it was obviously a bit too noisy. I was trying my best to keep the noise down and (genuinely, provably) on my way to drop the bike off to have it repaired.

The Cop that pulled me over was happy to chat about it when I explained that it was on its way to get fixed he let me off.

Then a Harley that was twice as loud went past and the cop says "Cor, doesn't that sound lovely!" I asked him if he was going to pull it over for being louder than mine and he suddenly got very grumpy with me again. I didn't push any further as I didn't want to end up with a fine.

What's the old line?

"Harley's are probably the most efficient machine to turn gasoline into noise without that pesky by-product of horsepower."

To be fair to that cop I think you were too. Did you try solving the problem for yourself first?

Being woken up 1:00 in the morning multiple times a week by the walls of my house shaking from my neighbors vehicles makes me a pansy?

But I did talk to them. Turns out he lives with his mom, and she just bitched me out.

Ergo he has no incentive to target certain laws. Nothing I said was incorrect