Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud

January 17, 2022 1:52 PM

The recent Nature-Deficit Disorder post reminded me of the video "Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud" [SYTL] on the Not Just Bikes channel. We don't want to go to nature to escape from cities; we want to escape from noise. Specifically, the noise from car horns, exhaust pipes, but especially tires.

The City Beautiful channel also asks "Can we make cities car free?" (The answer is yes, and some cities have.)

As a Houstonian I can relate to the Why City Design is Important (and Why I Hate Houston) video in particular. Parking lots, parking lots every where, / Nor any side to walk.

posted by AlSweigart (33 comments total)

How refreshing, to hear recognition that the very sound of tires on pavement is NOISY. City sounds can be wonderful, and can be quite missed, if you leave. But still, escaping it is wonderful.

Special clue for Manhattanites: Riverside Park. Go down a couple levels, and the noise is very much reduced!
posted by Goofyy at 2:16 PM on January 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

we want to escape from noise.
Obligatory.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 2:53 PM on January 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I resent cars as much as the next guy, but can we not pretend like they’re the only thing that makes cities loud? Subway trains are loud. Construction is loud. People spilling into and out of bars is loud. Schoolyards are loud. Neighbors are loud.

Would I love to live in a city that has far less honking? Yes! But maybe we can work on that without pretending that it will magically turn all of our streets into Riverside Park, or that anyone should expect or want to live in a city without hearing other people.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 2:56 PM on January 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

I live in a place where I can hear other people... Guess what ? It's because of reduced car speeds and car free zones. And yes, I live in the Netherlands.
posted by Pendragon at 3:00 PM on January 17, 2022 [13 favorites]

> can we not pretend like they’re the only thing that makes cities loud? Subway trains are loud [...]

Who's pretending? This was addressed in the video along with DB readings.
posted by user92371 at 3:01 PM on January 17, 2022 [26 favorites]

I live between a busy road and I -95 in a city and while the cars aren't silent it's the giant construction trucks that are the worst, followed by intentionally - loud vehicles and dirt bikes. The cars are not nearly as bad as the endless lawnmowers and leaf lowers of the suburbs. In comparison, the cars are fine. The El can be super loud at times. My personal favorite is the rare ship fog horn, those I love.
posted by sepviva at 3:02 PM on January 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

My home is on a quiet street. There is the main/feeder road nearby and that is the source of most of the noise I hear all day. Tires tires tires muffler, shitty manifold no muffler, tires tires tires. This hits so at home to me. Giant under inflated truck tires wogglewogglewogglewoggle by and I find it the most distracting and obvious noise pollutant. Friggin leaf blowers come in a close second but the road....the damn road.
posted by djseafood at 3:41 PM on January 17, 2022 [6 favorites]

I resent cars as much as the next guy, but can we not pretend like they’re the only thing that makes cities loud? Subway trains are loud. Construction is loud. People spilling into and out of bars is loud. Schoolyards are loud. Neighbors are loud.

You’re not entirely wrong but the numbers matter. Cars are everywhere and spread noise for a long distance — especially the giant insecurity complexes many drivers are buying these days, which I often notice half a dozen or more blocks away.

Schools are never even close to that loud, and the loudest is only a few minutes a day. Bars and other sources of amplified music are louder, but only in the commercial districts. Trains can be loud - CSX runs some unusually heavy trains by here around 11pm - but the tracks aren’t everywhere and they don’t run that many trains. The boy-racers who like to rally race around the area are just as loud and the fart noises aren’t restricted to near the tracks or just the 10-15 minutes it takes a train to pass.

Trucks & buses can be loud but they don’t run on every street and the drivers are professionals who tend to be better drivers and not do things like honk continuously when the person ahead of them has the audacity to drive the speed limit or yield to pedestrians.
posted by adamsc at 5:18 PM on January 17, 2022 [6 favorites]

I agree with the overall point that cars create many problems, which make living in cities far worse than it could be. But the Not Just Bikes guy is way too flippant and narrow in his focus for my liking. Much of his argument in the linked videos boils down to something like: they replaced cars with bikes and sidewalks in various places in Europe, and it's great, so everyone else should be able to do the same. There is some truth to that, but there are problems to consider beyond just city planning regulations in other parts of the world. For example, much of Europe has an uncharacteristically stable and mild climate. In contrast, walking or biking long-distance in Fargo in the middle of winter, or in Phoenix in the middle of summer, can actually be life-threatening. (The same goes for many other places in the world, such as large parts of Africa, Middle East, and Asia.) It would still be possible to reduce the dependence on cars in those places with more robust bus and train networks, but one has to take into account the time people would be expected to spend outside when making plans there, and the ideal scenario is not likely to look like the Netherlands.

Another thing that should be taken seriously in discussions about reducing dependence on cars is accessibility. Some people physically can't walk or bike very far. Again, cars aren't the only way to transport them, but their needs should at least be acknowledged when showing a massive bike highway and suggesting that everyplace else has it wrong.

Next, in 2021 one also has to consider congestion on public transit. Packing in masses of people in buses and trains is a great way to spread viruses like covid-19. What are you supposed to do in a place like New York City or Paris (which do have great public transit) without cars, if you're immunocompromised and need to get from one end of town to the other in a reasonable amount of time? Personally, I think that Manhattan would greatly benefit from banning private cars from many streets, for example, but again, public health is something that one should at least acknowledge in discussions of this sort.

It may very well be that the ideal way to live (both from a mental health and a sustainability perspective) is in a small city with a mild climate, robust public transit, extensive pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and businesses located close where people live. But, for a number of reasons, that's not in the cards for many people in the world. In short, while it may be true that Houston has much to learn from Amsterdam, it's a bit more complicated than what those videos suggest.
posted by epimorph at 7:54 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

You should not judge a person's worldview from a single video. Check out more of the videos on the channel and you just might find your concerns addressed.

Actually, I was being a bit flippant. You will find those concerns addressed. Disability, temperature, and how discouraging cars doesn't actually eliminate them entirely are all discussed.

The point isn't to ban cars (the guy often talks about how he still uses car share cars on occasion!), it's to provide alternatives that most people can and will use, making life better for everyone, including those who continue to drive.
posted by wierdo at 8:44 PM on January 17, 2022 [12 favorites]

Where I live now, sure, its all wheel noise and exhaust noise from Lawrence RacewayExpressway, but the temp housing I was in when I first moved in was near a commuter railway and every day at 6:30 am I'd wake up to a long horn, which my drowsy mind interpreted as a car crash. Nope, just CalTrain crossing Mathilda Ave.

The good news I guess is that I was never late for work that first month.
posted by pwnguin at 8:45 PM on January 17, 2022

A lot of the "we still need cars" arguments I see from folks already have solutions that are in place in very hot and very cold climates. NotJustBikes has a video about the Finnish city of Oulu for example and the massive amounts of cycling people there do in the dead of winter. These solutions are just not widely adapted across other parts of the world because Car God still has a lot of worshippers at the altar, especially here in North America. And while I appreciate the severity of pandemics mixing with public transit, we are going to get absolutely nowhere with climate change if we don't start dropping the private vehicle as our go-to first choice for getting from point A to point B. That requires us to dramatically shift our thinking, for sure. It needs to be "how do we do this here" and not leaning towards "we're incredibly unique and nothing will work here."
posted by erratic meatsack at 9:52 PM on January 17, 2022 [14 favorites]

I live between a busy road and I -95 in a city and while the cars aren't silent it's the giant construction trucks that are the worst, followed by intentionally - loud vehicles and dirt bikes.

yeah, I'm half a block off a major road. It's not the cars that wake me up. The cars are like waves on the seashore, a consistent sort of coming and going, but never exactly the same thing twice. Whereas the big trucks and the various police and fire and ambulance sirens, and the f***ing motorcycles -- they're just noisy.

The cars in the thousands and tens of thousands are slowly killing me with the toxicity of their fumes. But at least they sound kind of nice.
posted by philip-random at 10:10 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Pre-modern cities were very loud though. We have a lot of stuff from Rome going on about the noise day and night. For example, Caligula sent soldiers to keep the area around the Green racing faction stablds quiet before a race and that was in the Campus Martius, outside the city proper.

And it never stopped because commerical traffic could only enter the city proper at night. Part of the issue is the density of pre-modern cities, but still reading through people living in them you hear constant complaints about noise.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 2:42 AM on January 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yes, it is worth watching more of the Not Just Bikes videos if you are at all interested, because "flippant and narrow in his focus" is a very inaccurate description. He discusses at length issues of accessibility, weather and climate, infrastructure cost and maintenance, taxes, public transportation, and even driving - making a point of showing how better and more thoughtful infrastructure can also be better for those who still do need to want to drive.

Also, of course there are other noisy things in the world than cars, but it is very easy to miss how loud they are when they are a constant background, and to notice intermittent things like construction much more. Which is why it is useful to take actual measurements, and to compare cities with different styles of infrastructure. You know, like he did here.
posted by Nothing at 3:38 AM on January 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

Can also confirm: cars make a city loud. I lived in NYC for 10 years and now I live in Amsterdam. And yeah, there's still construction and the occasional scooter/moped, but it's nothing like the constant, inescapable, oppressive drone of ubiquitous car noise in NYC. Or the honking festival that happened on my street at 2:30pm every single weekday when the two schools at the end of the street let out and backed up traffic for an hour. Here kids go to school on bike, or foot, or on their parent's bikes if they're really little, so no absurd daily traffic jams in the middle of a city.
posted by antinomia at 3:40 AM on January 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

As another New Amsterdam to Old Amsterdam transplant... antinomia and Pendragon are right -- it's nice to not to hear cars all day. The tourists are sometimes loud, but that might be the price for living in a picturesque neighborhood.

Not Just Bikes has a video about how the Netherlands is the best country in the world for drivers, since they've greatly reduced congestion by making it possible for people who don't want to drive to use alternate forms of transportation. They have another video about the minature microcars of the Netherlands (like the Canta and Biro) that make it possible for people who are unable to bike for some reason to maintain mobility while also making use of the bike lanes. And if you really want to get into the traffic-planning nerdery, there are videos on how the ubiquitous traffic calming, the advanced traffic light technology and the continuous sidewalks change the feel of the roadways to prioritize pedestrians and bikers without requiring lots of signs and enforcement.

They are wrong, however, about there being no garbage day in Amsterdam (despite having 1 million views!). The underground afval containers are not everywhere in the city and on my street we put trashbags out on Monday and Thursday nights, which attract the seagulls that wake me up before sunrise as they fight over the scraps. Still better than honking traffic, but the meeuwen are really just pretty rats with wings.
posted by autopilot at 5:14 AM on January 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

Pairs well with Billy Bremner's "Loud Music in Cars"
posted by DougieGee at 5:35 AM on January 18, 2022

Cities aren't loud

"Insomnia causes most deaths here . . . Show me the apartment
that lets you sleep! In this city sleep costs millions,
and that’s the root of the trouble. The waggons thundering past
through those narrow twisting streets, the oaths of draymen caught
in a traffic-jam, would rouse a dozing seal—or an emperor."
(Juvenal, Satire 3.232–238)

The subject is Rome ca. 100AD.
posted by BWA at 5:39 AM on January 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I've now lived in two places where due to some quirks of road design (like, coming around a slight bend and then the road opens out), people would accelerate hard directly in front of where I lived. At the first place, the loud vehicles were all motorcycles, but at the second it was cars where people had put on the loud mufflers to be more like Fast and Furious. I found those much worse than the motorcycles because the sound is higher and more piercing.

Very slight changes in road design would have prevented or reduced the problem, like narrowing the road slightly or otherwise removing the signals to drivers of "you are exiting the slow part of the road and now you can speed up." I am currrently living in a place where the roads on both sides have fairly effective measures to keep traffic going at a reasonable speed, and as a result there is just a low background level of car noise, with the occasional siren or loud stereo.

In contrast, walking or biking long-distance in Fargo in the middle of winter, or in Phoenix in the middle of summer, can actually be life-threatening. (The same goes for many other places in the world, such as large parts of Africa, Middle East, and Asia.) It would still be possible to reduce the dependence on cars in those places with more robust bus and train networks, but one has to take into account the time people would be expected to spend outside when making plans there, and the ideal scenario is not likely to look like the Netherlands.

I think that while the details would obviously need to be different, the big picture of people everywhere needing more equitable road access and physical design that makes multimodal transportation safe and effective, applies everywhere. It should look very different in different parts of the world (ie, do you want buildings to be closer together to create shade? Are you in a place where snow removal is the main challenge? Do you need funiculars to help with steep hills?), but the overall effect should be similar in terms of making walking, bicycling, mass transit, and yes, cars, all able to use roads and get around safely. Particularly in the US, we are way to fast to say "oh sure that works in the Netherlands, but it would never work here" without seriously looking at what would work here.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:00 AM on January 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I was trying to put my finger on why I felt so annoyed reading some of these comments, and then I figured it out: it's like arguing with anti-vaxxers when they say, "getting the covid shot doesn't keep you from getting covid" and, after a sigh, knowing you'll have to "yes, but" and point out the obvious but probably not be listened to anyway.

Yes, cities will still have loud noises even if you got rid of the loud noises from excessive car traffic. Yes, some people have mobility issues that prevent them from riding a bicycle. Yes, hot and cold climate produce challenges for mass transit. And yes, I'm sure the citizens of ancient Rome complained about how noisy the city was despite existing before cars.

But... actually I don't have the energy to point out the obvious. I'm stepping away from my own thread.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:15 AM on January 18, 2022 [27 favorites]

I often think about how the world would sound without road traffic. Prompted by things like:

- I notice how much I relax when I step off a busy road into a quieter side street.

- When I visited New York, I couldn't believe how much honking there was. It made the traffic sound so aggressive. Same in Boston. It's a big part of why I didn't warm to either city. (Long time ago now. I should go back sometime and try again.)

- When I'm out walking in the countryside, although I focus on listening to the birds, I can (nearly always) also hear the nearest big road - even when it's across several miles of fields. Some nature reserves are so blighted by traffic noise that it amazes me the wildlife doesn't leave.

- It doesn't snow much here, but when it does, you quickly discover how much of car noise is actually tyre noise. Those things are *sneaky* on snow. You turn around, thinking yourself alone, and there's one RIGHT THERE BEHIND YOU! I love how quiet it is everywhere under those conditions, but the feeling of being stalked by cars is a bit unnerving.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 7:16 AM on January 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

I live between a busy road and I -95 in a city and while the cars aren't silent it's the giant construction trucks that are the worst, followed by intentionally - loud vehicles and dirt bikes.

I don't think I know who sepviva is but I'm about 95% sure they live up the street from me - although I couldn't tell you how far up the street.

The near constant whir of 95 is definitely less intrusive than the packs of screaming kids roaming the last neighborhood we lived in, but when COVID hit, every Dodge and Harley Davidson for a hundred miles took to I-95 as the sun went down, and that got old real fast.

Where I live now, I get the cars on 95, the cars on the street my bedroom looks out onto, I'm under a helicopter highway, I can hear both the El and the PATCO, there's the occasional oscillating sub-bass of a tugboat dragging a barge up the Delaware, and construction of some form or another nearby is probably going to be happening for the rest of my life. That's life in a growing, bustling city. Now, I can walk a few blocks into the oldest part of the city, and there are parks and churchyards and alleys that are delightfully quiet. When I need to blot things out in the house, I've got headphones, or I can turn on a fan for some white noise.

To me, the tradeoffs are worth living in a walkable, interesting place, with no shortage of things to see and do. I'm fortunate to live in a city that predated the automobile by over a century though - as reflected in the layout and in the infrastructure.
posted by Leviathant at 7:44 AM on January 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

I really like the video's comment about how horns should be required to be at least as loud inside the car as they are outside the car. Soooooo much.
posted by xedrik at 7:49 AM on January 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

I often think about how the world would sound without road traffic.

I've had two experiences where things went suddenly much quieter (though not to zero). The first was after 9/11/2001, where airplanes were grounded and in the town I was living in people just kind of stayed home for a bit, so the roads were near-deserted for a short time. The second was in the first wave of pandemic lockdowns, where traffic where I was living dropped not quite to zero, but close to it, before slowly picking back up.

The sudden difference in sound levels was very noticeable.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:16 AM on January 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

The relatively cheap construction of housing contributes greatly to the noise problem. Proper walls and floors made of material other than paper mean you don't hear your neighbors, and proper triple paned windows (none of this leaky single paned nonsense) makes outside noise less of an issue. A bit more expensive to fix than getting rid of cars tho.
posted by fragmede at 9:26 AM on January 18, 2022

I live near a major freeway that at night becomes a solid dragstrip due to lack of traffic. I've gone about 135mph on it, and live in a nice-enough area where people with supercars drive it at full speed all night. You can really hear the revving engines in thin cold air in the winter, in the summer it's much less noticeable with the trees fully leafed out.

I used to live nearby in an apartment where the freight railline passed through and they hadn't gone to no-horn yet. My god that was terrible. Once every few hours at night - bwahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! And my apartment less than 150 ft from the crossing. It threw me out of bed more than once. Noisy cars don't compare.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:34 AM on January 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

ManyLeggedCreature: It doesn't snow much here, but when it does, you quickly discover how much of car noise is actually tyre noise.

We notice that a lot because more and more people drive electrics here (including us). At normal city speeds ad above, they still make noise and that is just the tyres.
posted by Too-Ticky at 11:09 AM on January 18, 2022

I'm about 2.5 km away from a really busy highway (the 401 in Ontario, Canada) and for a year I was renting a place about 0.5 km closer to it and the highway was audible at times. During the day you can't notice it, and really wouldn't expect to, but at 2am in the morning if you're outside you'll hear this constant low-level roar coming from it. I guess all the other noise that's happening during the day breaks up the sound before it could get to the house and night time there's less of that happening. Thankfully that extra half-km makes enough of a difference that I can't ever hear it from my house.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:27 AM on January 18, 2022

I have always lived on a busy street, and it's instilled upon me a deep loathing for illegally modified mufflers, radios with the bass turned way up, and people who speed. Pretty much all of car culture.

But I never really realized how unbearably loud cars can be until the Christmas before last when I tried to have a socially distant conversation on the sidewalk with some relatives who pulled up to say hi.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:27 AM on January 18, 2022

One of the many reasons I like living in cities is because of the noise I hear from inside my home. My favorite, in San Francisco, was an apartment from which I could hear foghorns on the Bay.

In 2015 in Portland, OR, I could hear streetcars underneath my windows and it made me really happy.

In 2016 I moved to my current place, at the corner of a five-way intersection. The honking and the revving was intense but in March 2020 lockdown happened and the intersection went silent. That was when I started paying more attention to the people walking past.

During lockdown and working from home and ever since then I look out my windows many times a day during every trip to the kitchen or bathroom. I witness so many conversations and arguments among pedestrians and have learned the barks of the nearby dogs. I recognize a couple different motorcycle and car engines that drive past my house every day.

I can almost set my clock by that yappy dog, early Tuesday trash pickup, the 18 bus and the daily 8PM helicopters.

Living in a noisy place lets me be aware of my neighborhood without necessarily having to go outside.
posted by bendy at 4:08 AM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Modern cars are generally much quieter mechanically than they used to be, but that the use of much wider tyres and the high proportion of 4WDs has not only changed the nature of car noise to be mostly tyre noise, but made that tyre noise much louder. I live about 200 metres from a busy road with an 80 km/h speed limit and the difference between the normal background hum of tyres turns into a loud and intrusive drone when the roads are wet. It's rare to actually hear mechanical noise from cars at this distance.
posted by dg at 3:37 PM on January 19, 2022

The streetcars in San Francisco are very noisy. The old ones, yes, but even the new ones. They rumble along like an overloaded tractor-trailer. Perhaps part of it is that US streetcars are apparently required to be much heavier than average ("for safety"), perhaps the tracks or the cars are built and maintained to a lower quality-- I don't know, but it's frustrating, because they should be part of the solution and not the problem.
posted by alexei at 12:44 PM on January 22, 2022