I wish California would implement something like a revenue neutral cost shift on registration. Louder vehicle pay more (progressively with how loud they are, quieter ones pay less-- adjusted to be a net increase in cost over the median and a net decrease under it. (With louder defined using their noise at 0-25MH speeds)
I'd certainly feel better about the irritating motorcycles if they were subsidizing all the quiet EVs. The bikers say the ear splitting noise is useful to improve safety? Okay, they can pay for it.
Like other forms of pollution we don't need to immediately stop all of it to make an improvement.
The majority of motorcycles are not very noisy in stock form. The issue is with absurdly loud aftermarket exhausts.
So increasing registration tax based on noise level won't make much of a difference. You have to go after the aftermarket stuff.
I've had a really noisy bike (loud exhaust installed by previous owner) and a completely stock bike after that. I vastly prefer the stock exhausts. Quiet most of the time, made a nice sound when I really gave it the beans, but nothing excessive.
The noise generation we're talking about are orders of magnitude off from your average tire noise, though. I swear some of the cars around here have trumpets installed in place of mufflers. Some of the Harleys set off car alarms as they pass because of their optimized mufflers.
To be fair, those are illegal, but enforcement seems to be non-existent.
I agree but I'd also like to see tax paid on size of the vehicle because it's literally using more of the public highway. So motorbikes would still pay less, probably.
The SUV users say it improves safety. OK, they can pay for it.
Yes because it is appropriate to have to pay more to have a safe mode of 'green' transit. Loud motorcycles are annoying; when they have a fatality rate per mile closer to cars you be can complain on that basis.
The riders intentionally choose a less safe form of transit and gain many benefits from doing so, including lower fuel and maintenance cost. Good for them, but their noise is an externality: I shouldn't get less enjoyment from my home because someone decided to use a less safe but more cost efficient mode of transportation.
The loud noise also presumably causes something of an arms race with more acoustically insulated, less fuel efficient, cars.
The eventual alternative is outright banning the noise. I think paying for some of that externality would be better.
I assume the noise complaints are primarily directed at Harley Davidsons with aftermarket pipes (or possibly any bike with aftermarket pipes), but...
> The riders intentionally choose a less safe form of transit and gain many benefits from doing so, including lower fuel and maintenance cost.
You've never actually owned or regularly ridden a motorcycle, have you?
They're as expensive, and often more expensive, to maintain than a car if they're your primary form of transport[1]. Service intervals tend to be much shorter (3750 - 10000 miles, depending on model), and tyres don't last anywhere near as long (2500 - 5000 miles, again, depending on the bike and the tyres). A new pair of good tyres (and you really want good tyres) is going to set you back about £300. When I was commuting 70 - 80 miles per day I was having to get my bike serviced and tyres replaced every 7 weeks.
The main reason I choose my bike over my car nine times out of ten is agency: I want to be able to decide how long a journey will take, not have it decided for me by the volume of traffic.
[1] Obviously this depends on the bike and car being compared, which can vary wildly - cheap(er) to run commuter bikes do exist, as per cars, but any kind of sports bike, mid-high end tourer, cruiser, roadster, etc., will probably have significant costs associated with maintenance.
I used to ride a bike as my main transport. It really depends on your model. A Ninja 250 will be a lot cheaper than a car (especially when you count insurance), a CBR 600 that gets put through its paces, not so much.
But then, I wasn't keeping my bike in great tires/etc, and I wasn't commuting nearly as far as you.
I hate excessively loud bikes as much as anyone; there is a line between 'hearable' and 'earsplitting' that is often missed. Is not some noise, though, a de minimis appropriate compense for the danger associated with choosing a lighter weight, more environmental, and federal HOV-compliant vehicle? If the per person transportation ecologics and economics are favorable for bikes vs. cars shouldn't we look to improve the externalities (safety) around such transportation methods? Even if it comes with some externtalacious discomfort?
(fwiw my current vehicle is approximately the loudest allowable per federal regulations, because I enjoy the sound it makes, not safety per say.)
I don't. The worst way to start my day is to be woken up by some moron revving their Harley on the road near my home at 6.20am.
GP's point is that everyone is paying the price for the choices that operators of motorbikes make. No one wants to listen to 'loudest allowable per federal regulations' riding past their family home after-hours. That price needs to be factored into the cost of operating a motorbike/truck/other loud transport near population centres.
>I don't. The worst way to start my day is to be woken up by some moron revving their Harley on the road near my home at 6.20am.
That might be relevant if those Harley's were anywhere near the legal dB limit.
P.S. the hate I'm getting here for stating that I follow the law, to the letter, on noise regulations is insane. If you/anyone think a straight pipe Harley is close to legal check your facts.
Loud motorcycles inflict sensorineural hearing loss on anyone unfortunate to get too close to them. I think that's an adequate basis on which to complain and demand something be done about it.
It always depends where you live. I lived next to a main crossing once and I certainly got my share of air pollution there. If you would have asked me back then what I’d rather get rid off — noise or air pollution — I think I would’ve picked air pollution.
The effect constant noise polution has is very hard to grasp. I only noticed what it did to me when I moved to a new flat after a few years.
It felt like a 1000 pound weight had been lifted from me, and I realized it was about the noise after all. My sleep got much better, which had all kinds of positive effects on the rest of my life.
I can still remember vividly the first night I slept in the new flat in (what felt like) complete silence and peace for the first time in years.
If I could give advice to my past me, I would tell myself that the noise affects me much more than I thought.
Your experience made me think back to the noisiest nights of sleep I recall ever having. Earplugs were an absolute godsend. Did you try those at your old flat?
You can buy air filter/purifiers for air pollution.
You can avoid plastic to some degree.
You can't isolate all noise factors, especially low-freq vibrations.
Try sleeping in an area where road noise occurs 24/7. Sleep deprivation is a huge health modifier.
"Not paying attention to X because Y is more important"
Most people don't give a shit about Y, when X isn't fixed for them, they see X as far more immediate/important problem: its like telling an african tribe that cooked for thousands of years with wood that you can't burn wood from tropical forest for cooking because its causes Global Warming.
In other words, you can mitigate your exposure any given pollution type to some degree. The air and plastic pollution measures you list are not perfect either. It's cheaper and easier to address noise pollution than air pollution: a pair of foam earplugs is a lot cheaper than an indoor air purifier.
> Try sleeping in an area where road noise occurs 24/7.
I admit I've never done that, but this seems like an unfairly extreme comparison. The same challenge can be posed for air pollution: try sleeping in an area where the air is bad enough to impact your sleep quality.
It is possible to tackle more than one issue at a time. Also realize that noise is often a measure of inefficiency - for instance, one of the ways to make trains quieter is to keep wheels and rails smooth. That has the added benefit of extending the life of wheels and rails.
Noise pollution is more immediate problem. Once your neighbor installs loud AC or swimming pool pump right next to you bedroom window and you cannot fall asleep at night, you won’t even last a week of sleep deprivation. I would say solving noise pollution is actually higher priority than all the other issues you listed.
Every time we visit the relatives in London we end up talking about the air pollution and noise pollution. It's the noise or light pollution that stops us sleeping though. Then we sometimes talk about it again when we're far enough north to be away from it. It's so nice to have quiet, dark nights again, and the first sleep once back is incredibly refreshing.
We both think the relatives are certifiable to not have moved away. :)
Almost. We are right at the edge of a town in a rural part of the UK. :)
Moved for work - there was a surprisingly good opportunity that pulled us away from a more urban, but not major city, location. We did want to get out of urbanity anyway. Though I no longer work at the same place, hell will freeze before I move back to a city, or to nights that are no longer jet black.
ah but it just so happens that the cause of most air pollution, carbon in the atmosphere, and noise pollution in cities is the same thing: cars & trucks
I agree with this. Removing cars and trucks would solve so many problems with our living areas. Removing burner cars and trucks would do 90% of it even if we didn't evict them from our living areas.
When I go on a walk in town (with speed limits usually at 50 kph or 40 kph), it's generally the tire noise that prevents me from having an enjoyable chat. It's especially bad in wet weather, but even on dry asphalt it's rarely the engines that disturb me most.
I live, and am sitting, less than 500 feet from several trains right now. I can hear one rolling on the tracks. I can hear the ding-dong noise they play before they close the doors on another.
It is noooothing compared to the honking of any driver who feels like anything in the universe costing them more than one half of a second deserves an airhorn blast. Its nowhere near as annoying as the beep-beep-beep of trucks backing up. Its much fainter than the blasting ambulance and fire truck sirens necessary to pierce the bubble of car drivers attention. Its also much less than the idling engine noise of the delivery vans.
Honking from the (closer!) freeway barely registers. Horn blasts from the level crossing resonate in my chest. When a train zooms by it’s at least over quickly. When it lumbers out of the station and the whole sequence is delivered directly to my window, I just have to pause my conversation/TV show for a minute or two.
It was worth the substantial rent discount at the time I lived there, but pretty extreme as noise goes.
Agreed. Train noises can be soothing at a distance -- except, of course, any horn blasts. Road traffic is way more stressful, thanks to honking, revving, beeping, and occasional skidding.
Also, road sounds remind me of the stresses of driving in traffic, whereas the train rides I've taken in my life have been a lot more peaceful.
I lived in a student building between a major railway line in London and a large road.
The railway was far, far nicer. About ¾ of trains were electric, and just make a "whoosh" noise on the well-maintained welded track. The diesel trains were louder accelerating, but the noise wasn't participating disturbing.
My friend on the road side of the building couldn't open her window because of the traffic fumes, and even though the building was new and had good sound insulation, my side was nicer.
It doesn’t matter how long the trains are, but how often they run. You need trains running every few minutes to approximate the functionality of cars, and every one of them must honk at every level crossing.
German trains don't honk at level crossings and Germany doesn't build any new level crossings (for safety reasons). Japanese trains don't honk at crossings either afaik, I don't know about other countries.
One of the largest sources of noise pollution in residential areas are cars. Cars also happen to be a large source of carbon emissions and air pollution. Tackle that and get a win-win-win I'd say.
EVs will eliminate engine noise, they won't eliminate tire noise (fewer, lighter cars may) or aerodynamic noise (fewer, slower cars will). It will be a big improvement, but it will not take care of the problem; living at a major road will still be terrible. [1]
EVs don't appreciably reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, you need clean electricity generation for that. I'd hesitantly agree that they're going to be a part of a long term solution.
Zero tailpipe CO2 emissions are just one advantage of EVs. They also emit zero particulates, zero ozone, and negligible engine noise.
EVs get cleaner as grid power gets cleaner. By contrast, tightening emissions standards only affects brand-new conventional vehicles, and these only get dirtier as they age.
I'm aware. Hence my saying that they're a part of a long term solution.
The linked article doesn't actually say what an EV in West Virginia pollutes (just flat out states that it's less than a conventional car), but the national average quoted is a bit less than half of a conventional car. The OP -- as people often do -- pretended it's zero. It's not. If you want zero emissions: walk. Or ride a bike, which is a rounding error off of zero. I hope you're just as quick to post your article when people make that mistake.
The number gets lower as grids get cleaner, yes, if they get cleaner. But we're at best struggling to clean up our grids, and moving transportation to electricity is going to roughly double the demand; at least if we pretend we don't have to simultaneously change the way we "consume" mobility.
Tires are on all vehicles. Combustion is a larger and more immediate concern because of NOX and PM2.5/PM10. Its fair to prioritize that by moving burner power out of cities and using EVs, then go after other sources of PM and NOx like power plants or tires.
My neighbors put up a 20 foot plus wide American flag. It’s absurdly loud. When it storms and gets wet, it’s all I can hear inside my house.
While I don’t think it’s the next public health crisis, it’s certainly a crisis for me. And no, there’s nothing I can do about it. Good luck getting a city official to take up that battle. I’ve been told that maybe I’m just more sensitive to noise than others, and that their sensors can’t pick up noises over wind.
If you want to do something: Find your local color guard and make contact, they're usually pretty good about reaching out and educating people about flag care and conduct. I'm not one to be that kind of patriotic, but I've seen various color guard groups around the country educate car dealerships, restaurants, retail stores, etc. Either proper care was taken from that point forward, or the flag was removed.
Speech itself is also covered by freedom of speech, does that mean you can shout into your neighbours property for hours a day? With amplification? From a recording?
I lived in a house on a busy street for 9 months. The master bedroom was in the back and there were only 2 types of traffic we could here back there: emergency vehicles and motorcycles with pipes. They were very loud in the front of the house. Motorcycles were far more common than emergency vehicles in summer. Cold weather luckily put a damper on the motorcycles eventually. So irritating. They terrified one of my cats every time they went by. I wonder why there aren't automated tickets for noise like the are for running red lights and speeding?
Do these things actually contribute meaningfully to air pollution? I think "rolling coal" is silly because it's so childishly spiteful, but I've rarely actually seen it.
It’s a regional thing I suspect. It’s a big problem in utah, home of the Diesel Brothers and some of the worst air pollution in the country. It’s just recently illegal here.
One guy doing it might not be that meaningful but, that’s true of just about everything.
I'm not totally embedded in the motorcycle lifestyle enough to give you a well written detail into the reasoning but I have been exposed to a lot of riders.
I'll say this. In numerous cases, loud motorcyclists do it for their SAFETY. Most motorists don't pay attention to a small vehicle, especially if it were quiet. Most motorists are listening to music or something else, so the road doesn't have their utmost attention. The LOUDness of their motorcycle jolts the unattended motorists that a tiny vehicle is nearby.
As for the excessively loud, etc, that's above my understanding.
Finally, your biggest defense against loud motorists (in your home) is double drywalled and good insulation in your home. It will become a lot quieter and you'll have energy efficiencies by doing so.
I love it when someone who deliberately has a loud motorbike insists it has to be loud for safety reasons. I have met a few people who have claimed this. It always appears to be the only thing they do for safety reasons, the rest of their lives being a messy blur of insanely risky life decisions.
> It always appears to be the only thing they do for safety reasons, the rest of their lives being a messy blur of insanely risky life decisions
They don't wear chaps. Nor helmets. Nor anything else for safety. But let's reduce the argument only to your perception of this issue. /s Come on. Let's be more rational than this.
Yes, motorcyclists are risky. Yes they do numerous risky things. But everything we (a more general claim) do is on a gradient. It's on a sliding scale. Let's stop reducing this issue to 'loud noises don't help much. Nor has anyone, that I met claimed this. They are reckless people'.
I am not saying that motorcyclists in general are reckless people. I am saying that all the motorcyclists I know who have tried to claim that they have a loud motorbike for safety reasons are at the reckless end of the spectrum, regarding the motorcyclists that I know. And I find this contrast pretty funny. To the extent that I have had to previously explain why I am giggling to someone who looks like they could rip off my head with one hand. After pointing out the bare arms and jeans that they often ride in, they admitted I had a point, said they actually just like loud noises and started giggling too, thankfully.
I have never bought this argument. Motorcycle pipes point backward. On the highway, you can't really hear them until they have passed you and are thus already in your field of vision. If the point is to alert drivers that you are on their blind spot, why not direct the sound forward?
Direction of the pipe might be more efficient on that front but it doesn't mitigate that it DOES help. I can hear cars behind me that are loud and their loud mufflers are pointing back too.
You might never have 'bought' the argument but direction of the pipe doesn't take away from the fact that MOST people DO hear them as they begin to pass you. Except when they zip through going illegal mph. That's something that...baffles me. Why zip through WITH loud mufflers. They don't seem to be too bright but...fate comes for those cyclists fairly quickly.
Motorcycles are just straight up dangerous, loud pipes aren't going to change that. Even if every single car on the road was self driving, it would still be dangerous.
If you want to become an organ donor, then go ahead. But you can't make everyone else deal with the externalities of your choice.
Risk doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not black/white.
Loud pipes do help. Your minimizing of it doesn't negate that truth.
As for self-driving etc, ummm that's a bit off tangent. This is a discussion about noise pollution with an emphasis on motorcycle and the rationale to it.
I hate noise pollution. I accidentally picked the worst apartment I can imagine, and I didn't realize it until I moved in: right next to the road that leads to the freeway on-ramp. After about 8pm, everyone wants to get on the highway as fast as possible, which results in tons of noise pollution.
I finally broke down and got the Sony WH1000MX3 headphones, which apparently have the "best" active noise cancellation. They do help, but they aren't perfect. They're also super expensive, which makes them impractical for a lot of people.
The entire problem could be solved with EVs or enforcing noise ordinances, but I feel like it just takes one person to ruin the whole thing.
When a construction site sprang up next door to me, I was in the same situation. In addition to noise cancelling headphones, I also wear foam earplugs underneath and sometimes even stream white noise.
If I could pass one dictatorial law --- hypothetically ignoring constituents and implementation details, but limited to pretty low-consequence stuff --- I would give serious consideration to pricing car honking at max($5, $5 x # of seconds honking). If you really need to honk, you'll happily pay $5 for the ability. If you don't, please spare us your tantrum.
I live on a semi-busy street in a big east coast city. It's almost amazing how many people honk and how often out of what looks mostly like frustration or spite. At least once a month someone honks for thirty straight seconds, always because they are mad about traffic that nobody can change.
Now that's a good idea. Just adjust the required loudness level to be the same as max(inside of average car right next to you, open street 10m from you), otherwise the extremely low sound could disorient you.
Oh my I'm sure glad you can't pass such a dictatorial law [1]. By directly charging people for using a safety mechanism that they bought with their car, you are incentivizing people to reduce the physical safety of others around them.
You really want that average American, with less than $400 in savings, to think twice about honking and potentially saving someone's life by warning them of danger? It's not even about actually saving $5, it's about the length of time it takes to think about it. Even if you decide not to save the $5 and go for it, honk! you may have delayed so long that someone is now dead that could have been saved.
> If you really need to honk, you'll happily pay $5 for the ability.
This is very definitely not true and an incredible danger to society. Please reconsider the unintended consequences of charging poor people to maintain other people's physical safety on the roads and sidewalks.
[1] And I think this is a wonderful example of why all dictatorships are bad, especially those run by people who think they know all the solutions already.
The point is to make them think twice about the DISTINCTION between honking to save somebody's life and honking to express their own annoyance or frustration.
(I think the idea of tying the could level inside the car to outside is better, but that you are missing the point)
I would put like four figures into a kickstarter if somebody would make some kind of solar-panel+webcam+18650+microphones+arduino kit that can be strapped to every telephone pole and traffic light that just feeds back data on what license plates honk when and where to a public dataset.
Welcome to Shanghai, we have it, provided by the government. 5 years ago it was such a cacophony, then they passed the law forbidding honking, and now cars just flash their lights like crazy. Scooters still honk though, but since they're all EV and otherwise pretty quiet, it's a reasonable enough tradeoff.
Russia also has regulations forbidding the honking within cities except for signaling immediate danger, and it seems to work well, somebody would honk for no good reason sometimes, but the fellow drivers wouldn't approve of it. The lack of automatic enforcement allows to use it sparingly to e.g. wake up somebody at the traffic light and not worry about protesting the fines.
God I love not living in a dense city. I haven't heard a car horn in days. The air outside smells better than the air inside. Visiting NYC my biggest impression was how much a nightmare it would've been for me to live there. It sounded like a vacuum running all the time. It was all dark because the buildings blocked sunlight. The air made my nose burn. Seeing a tree and a patch of grass on a streetcorner was like an oasis in the middle of a concrete desert.
The trimmers and leaf blowers were the worst part of living in mountain view for me. My apartment had no AC (didn't really need it 99% of the time), so that meant open windows... and almost every day had a different neighbors lawn service blasting noise in the morning. Sometimes waking me up, almost always making it impossible to work from home.
I swear the quietest place to live is a pretty narrow street in a medium density urban neighborhood. All the buildings and trees really deaden the sound. When I lived in the boonies there was always a wood chipper going somewhere or barking dogs and nothing to break up the sound.
I live in Berlin. There are many very quiet neighborhoods and the city in general is a lot quieter than London or San Francisco. I never heard a car horn from my apartment.
I meant at all, not just from my house. Not on my drive to work or back home, or out to eat, or while running errands. City-dwellers, at least in the US, seem to use the horn like it's a legal requirement every file miles.
Car horn use seems to be extremely culture-dependent. I almost never hear it in Finland except when someone does something stupid in traffic. Though if I have understood correctly, "doing something stupid in traffic" is also considerably more common in the US than in Northern Europe.
Noise in general is a problem, but in particular it seems to me that emergency vehicle sirens have gotten much louder over the last few years. Also, the flashing lights on police cars seem like they're a lot brighter. Am I just imagining this?
Not sure about the siren level, but police cars have definitely been leveraging the low wattage bright LED technology to make their cars light up like the worlds brightest red & blue Christmas tree. Seems like they're innovating also on different strobe patterns to see just what is most attention getting. Sometimes I wonder if it isn't counterproductive to make your car so violently visible that nobody can actually look directly at it. Especially for drunks that might actually be drawn towards all those pretty flashin' lights.
Here in the UK, there seems to be a tendency towards the use of light/sirens at any opportunity.
I live near to a busy road junction and have often witnessed situations where the sirens make matters worse because some drivers panic to get out of the way when, really, the best thing they should do is just keep moving forwards.
AC installed between houses that are close to each other are another menace that makes it hard to sleep if your bedroom is on the wrong side of house. It’s not even the noise level, as it is the vibration and low frequency hum that often has an annoying phase that makes it difficult to ignore. White noise helps a bit, but that only works for people who are okay with blasting white noise in their bedrooms. Same goes for swimming pool pumps. Most places don’t have good laws regarding constant noise levels (as opposed to laws that govern things like loud music at night).
Noise pollution is a real problem that affects your health. And most of it could be solved by engineering if the required laws were more strict.
Seems like in the last decade, there's been a design trend in fast food restaurant for maximizing the ambient noise.
I love Chipotle's food, but I just can't eat inside, it's so ridiculously loud. I hope this trend dies soon.
"It’s aural litter — acoustical litter — and, if you could see what you hear, it would look like piles and piles of McDonald’s wrappers, just thrown out the window as we go driving down the road.”
That's how I feel about noise pollution inside the office.
I used to think my office was quiet until I got noise cancelling headphones. Now every time I take them off I am hit with a deafening ambiant noise which I think is a combination of the fans in peoples computers and the sound of cars making it through the building walls.
If your office has a significant amount of open space, chances are pretty good they're using white/pink noise generators to try and mask distracting sounds (conversations, etc).
Last place I worked at had one big room that was a couple hundred feet square, and they had the noise generators cranked up so high that you couldn't successfully have a conversation with someone unless they were within about five feet of you. When I'd walk outside, it was a physical relief from the onslaught of white noise.
https://mynoise.net is great for this. There are loads of sound generators for different environments, each of which has sliders for each frequency. I sometimes use it when I have trouble falling asleep (I pin the site to my homepage on Android Chrome).
frosted flakes mentioned pink noise; i recommend brown and/or grey noise. it really depends on the type of noise you're trying to counter, but these really helped me a lot with various types of road noise and lawnmower-style noise. pink, to my ears, is a bit thin/tinny, and doesn't assist much with my trigger points.
I did a ton of research when I got my place, about the area and all its quirk. It was fine. I bought it, then 2 years later a nearby airport changed their software which modified some flight routes, and more importantly lowered the altitude planes flew over extremely densely populated areas, making them incredibly noisy. All this happened in the name of saving fuel.
Now I haven't opened the windows in years, especially not at night (else its impossible to sleep), the outdoor deck is unusable except for days where planes don't actually fly over because of wind direction, etc. Starting to plan selling the place partly because of it. Fortunately a lot of people swear until they're blue in the face that this isn't happening (even though its easy to find proof), so resell value isn't affected.
Bungalow's leasing agent told me the house had air conditioning. There was a thermostat when I toured. Upon moving in I found out the house doesn't actually have air conditioning. Closing the windows won't be an option in the summer.
A lot of people say they are used to the sound and don't notice it. That's just not true though. I've sat outside at a bar and had a conversation interrupted because a plane flew overhead.
I live on Moffett Field and the noise from the 101 is deafening and the occasional noise from a C-130 isn’t even noticeable. Freeway noise is far more disruptive than almost airplanes.
Hearing that (no pun intended) doesn't give me hope for the new Moffett housing development, which I believe, would be even closer to 101 than Wescoat Village.
The area I live was fine until the FAA allowed planes to fly lower over the mountains into/out of the local airports now I can hear them from 5AM til 2AM every day (this is the SF Bay Area so I don't have AC to drown them out).
Are you going to some place with no airports? That seems to be the only solution to this sort of noise pollution.
Constant sirens from emergency vehicles seem to be about as useful as car alarms.
Except in urban environments the sirens are 24/7, reverberate for blocks, and are extremely hard to localize until the vehicle is right next to you and blaring at 120dB.
It's like someone constantly yelling "hey, there's an emergency somewhere!"
The technology is ready - EVs - but the ramp up is taking too long. States and cities need to ban the sale of new non-hybrid ICE vehicles starting now - there are already options at all price points.
Not even close. There are a lot of people who cannot afford EVs. There are a bunch of people who cannot afford a new car at any price. Most of the people you see on the road driving 20-year-old cars are not doing it by choice.
There are also a lot of people who could afford an EV but do not have a place to charge one, because they live in an apartment complex without chargers or need to use street parking. No, charging your car at work is not a good solution because there would not be enough chargers if everyone had to drive EVs.
The burden of banning internal-combustion vehicles would disproportionately fall upon renters and the poor, who are also the people most affected by noise pollution.
Its time to buck up and make some sacrifices for the sake of our health and our planet. All of these problems can be overcome with a little bit of effort. Are we that collectively lazy?
The technology is ready - EVs - but the ramp up is taking too long.
Above about 30-35 mph, EV's aren't much quieter than ICE cars, the contribution from road/tire noise starts to dominate for both types of autos above those speeds.
This does not seem reasonable. Internal combustion engines with mufflers are not very loud. If the goal is to reduce noise, why not simply set a maximum noise level, such as n dB at 1m from the tailpipe?
EVs are just as loud as any other modern appliance car. I yearn for the day when we figure out how to make tires that still perform well but are silent. They're so loud now that at anything more than about 20mph that's all you hear. And if you live within a few miles of a highway you get a constant background level of white noise from the tires.
Road builders could install noise reducing surfaces and fencing.
These increase costs which should be paid for by the people making the noise - vehicle drivers - but for some reason making those people and companies pay for their noise is politically unpopular.
What seven seater electric is available at a price point below $70k? Any electric minivans yet? How about electric jeeps under $50k? Can you tow a large trailer with electric vehicles under $100k? There aren’t “options at all price points.”
First half of the article felt more likely to be a modern risk due to earbuds. Actual ambient noise pollution might be a problem, but I doubt it. I don’t see how such studies could adequately control for air pollution. On a related note, this quote from the article didn’t make any sense to me:
> ‘If you could eliminate all motor-vehicle noise or all motor-vehicle air pollution—but not both—which would you choose?’ As a rule, the majority chose noise.”
I've worn earplugs and put a big fan next to my head every night for years, because I'm a very light sleeper. I don't get any kind of irritation from it.
I think the big thing is people don't know how to put earplugs in properly, the entire plug should be in your ear canal. To do it, you need to pull up from the top of your ear when inserting to fully seat it.
No, the big things are varying ear canal sizes and shapes, varying earplug sizes and shapes, and side sleepers.
Put an earplug in your ear that seals the ear canal, then press firmly on the outside of your ear canal (on the side of your head, in front of the tragus). Feel that pressure. Now imagine doing that for 8 hours a night.
I have had to sleep with ear plugs because of noise from neighbors. Two results: waking up with painful ear canals during the night, and semi-permanently enlarged ear canals, requiring the use of larger ear plugs to seal, which causes more pain.
If you can comfortably sleep with ear plugs with no adverse effects, you are lucky.
I sleep with plugs every night and I get that pain & irritation. It really sucks.
Maybe one day we progress as a society to the point where one's right to quiet isn't dwarfed by others' right to make noise. Not gonna hold my breath though..
I think you're one of the lucky ones, then, that the anatomy of your ear canal allows the earplug to seal the passage without the pillow putting pressure on it.
What almost works for me is using two differently sized earplugs and putting the smaller one in the pillow-side ear, because the pillow pushing on the ear canal causes it to seal despite the smaller plug. But when I roll onto my other side several times a night, I'd have to wake up and swap ear plugs. It's not feasible. :(
There's still the risk of inducing tinnitus (esp. if you had some mild hearing damage already, which I'm guessing is pretty common) - the theory is that, in total silence, the brain can eventually notice even the faintest tinnitus sound (that you might have had already due to hearing damage, but didn't notice because it was so quiet), and once you've became conscious of it, it will never go away.
I'd certainly feel better about the irritating motorcycles if they were subsidizing all the quiet EVs. The bikers say the ear splitting noise is useful to improve safety? Okay, they can pay for it.
Like other forms of pollution we don't need to immediately stop all of it to make an improvement.
Now lets talk about dark skies...