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There are few things that make me angrier than when a Harley-Davidson style motorcycle (or a pack of them) drive past me while I’m walking down the street. I ca
by baron816 6y ago
There are few things that make me angrier than when a Harley-Davidson style motorcycle (or a pack of them) drive past me while I’m walking down the street. I can’t believe cities haven’t prohibited them, especially at night. Those things are specifically designed to create noise pollution. They’re so fucking obnoxious, even just thinking about it while I’m writing this is working me up.
- metalliqaz 6y agoif the typical biker was a 24 year old hispanic man, they would be outlawed before you could say "ay caramba". Instead, boomers and genx white guys get a pass.
- ReactiveJelly 6y agoYes, it's frustrating that some people just don't believe in the human right to peace and quiet. That's one reason why I have no hope for self-organizing models of society. There are griefers who only respond to force, and it doesn't take many of them to fuck up the whole game.
- boredumb 6y agoYou believe we need a more authoritarian society because some people live lives that are louder than you deem appropriate and enough so that you are willing to 'respond with force' and you somehow see them as the people who are "fucking up the whole game"?
- dilutedh2o 6y agoamen
- LurkersWillLurk 6y agoI don't think the city council is oppressing anyone by having the police issue citations to people who wake me up at night with their obnoxious mufflers. The personal satisfaction from having a loud muffler is actually less important than my ability to sleep at night.
- boredumb 6y agoI may be misunderstanding, but having a city council isn't an antithesis to self organizing societies. In my understanding abandoning self organizing societies that could have more or less noise friendly communities in favor of top down politics that more closely resemble a centrally planned society/dictatorship.
- bdamm 6y agoAllowing a city to define what it means to live within it is generally accepted as not the same as a centrally planned society. Certainly that is the case within the United States, where there are very many options for what kind of city one wants to live in. We are not talking about city-states like Singapore. So yeah, we can penalize the noisemakers and not lose any sleep that we're degrading into a dictatorship.
- khafra 6y agoThe Coase Theorem suggests that, with sufficiently frictionless microtransactions, people who prefer to make noise and people who prefer not to hear noise could all be happier. Maybe a phone app with a decibel-meter and a distance metric to each other such app within hearing distance, with pre-authorized amounts to transfer for each decibel level created/experienced?
- neolog 6y ago"could all be happier" probably not, since currently the noisemakers are maximally happy making noise without paying anybody.
- khafra 6y agoLots of them would be happier to get a small amount of money for being just a little bit quieter. People preferring peace and quiet would be happy to pay a small amount of money to get fans of noisemaking to stay below their annoyance threshold. Rough sketch of a potential process: Harley Q. is riding through the hills with the throttle open when her phone buzzes, indicating she's approaching an area with residents willing to pay above her threshold for <80db experienced noise. She rolls off the throttle and coasts through the upcoming neighborhood, or takes the long way around. Maybe a small extra payment would be put in escrow if she doesn't approach that area while making noise for a few more weeks. Please note that the apparent bias toward paying the noisemaker is an artifact of existing noise ordinances. Coase can only help us from where we currently are, not from an imaginary utopia. If we place this in a hypothetical city with a 40db noise restriction, which allows neighborhoods to accept louder noises by consensus, the payments reverse; Ms. Q will try to select the cheapest neighborhood she can enjoy her noise through, and its residents will end up collectively richer in exchange for suffering through the noise.
- neolog 6y agoIt's obviously a problem that affected people have no way to solve this. Authoritarian use of force is one way that might be effective; other ways might be available. I'd be curious to hear some alternative options.
- young_unixer 6y agoCounter-example: Sounds are pressure waves that transmit through the air. Given enough pressure, those waves could even kill someone (bomb). If we say that there should be no legal limit to sound pressure, then making a bomb explode and killing people should have no legal consequences. This makes no sense, so we should put a threshold of maximum allowed sound pressure. The discussion now is where is that threshold.
- Tyr42 6y agoI mean, you don't need to regulate the maximum pressure, you just need to say "don't kill or injure anyone" right? You can place the regulation directly on what you want, not just upstream.
- jfim 6y agoSometimes outcomes are regulated, not the means of getting to that outcome. In your case, murder is illegal, but the instrument could be completely legal. For example, water is perfectly legal, although one could force someone to ingest too much water and killing them. It would still be illegal, even though water is legal. We should still regulate sound levels, mind you.
- jodrellblank 6y agoCounter-exampe: regulations exist relating to bombs, stabbing, and guns, without having any threshhold of maximum allowed pushing force or speed of matter.
- tayo42 6y agoLately I've come to the conclusion that peace and quiet really is a luxury to have. Most people I don't think get to experience it. You need to have money to have it so you can live somewhere nice. Other wise your stuck living in apartment buildings, crowded cities, next to noisy neighbors. Go to busy shared spaces (ppl stop playing radios out doors!) or staying in shitty hotels.
- neolog 6y agoWhat do you mean by it's a luxury? That it's nice? or rare? or should be rare?
- pb7 6y agoI think rare in the sense that few can afford to have it.
- nitrogen 6y agoPart of the problem is that those who don't appreciate it will see how nice a quiet town in the country is, then move from the big city to that town and destroy the very thing they originally enjoyed. Or bring a bluetooth boombox into the wilderness and play it so it can be heard for a mile away.
- vbezhenar 6y agoI'm sure that every country have tiny villages with cheap land. Buy enough land, build a house in the center, grow some trees around and you'll have peaceful house. Of course there are other issues with that lifestyle which is why it's not adopted widely, like no work, issues for children, issues with healthcare, but for some people it could work, IMO.
- pb7 6y ago> no work, issues for children, issues with healthcare There's the rub, no? You need to have a lot of money saved up to not have to work which makes it a luxury. For most people, they need to live near work, which is mostly in or near dense noisy cities.
- cowmoo728 6y agoJust remember the cure can be worse than the disease. I agree with you - mostly because of people who "roll coal" to poison cyclists for fun - but I'm wary of involving authority and force. Somehow there are societies that don't have as much of a problem with things like this, so maybe we should learn from them.
- ip26 6y agoAren't the societies that don't have these problems, often societies that readily employ authority & force & social coercion? Singapore, Japan.
- LinuxBender 6y agoMany most? cities do have noise ordinance laws that would prohibit choppers, but then cops have to decide if that want to take on that battle. Most bikers are super friendly. Some of them are not. One of the biker gangs in my area use a cocktail of drugs that make them fearless, angry, violent and it usually takes half a dozen cops to take down one of the bikers.
- saiya-jin 6y agosounds like exactly the kind of work cops should be doing
- LinuxBender 6y agoIt does, but most cops have spouses and children to go home to. Given options, they will lean towards writing tickets to people less likely to be violent. This is easy to fix and has been fixed in some cities, but then the blowback usually goes the other way. Citizens will complain that the department has been over militarized and will demand the department lose funding until all the military gear has been removed.
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- anigbrowl 6y agoYou'd think that, but the effort does not always yield the expected results: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/03/709432311/texas-prosecutor-drops-all-charges-in-2015-biker-shootout-that-killed-9 https://www.npr.org/2019/04/03/709432311/texas-prosecutor-dr...
- mc32 6y agoIt’s not only choppers that are loud. High RPM street bikes which get “gunned” by their riders are also very loud and more frequent than passé choppers.
- dheera 6y agoThe one thing that makes me even angrier is gas-powered leaf blowers that make multiple passes past my apartment, and seemingly deliberately linger for longer if I'm in the middle of a conference call. Seriously, go electric and ban those abominations.
- RootReducer 6y agoI would be ecstatic if my city banned leaf blowers.
- ericbarrett 6y agoThey might already be—I lived in a city where they were “banned.” And yet I never saw a landscaper using an electric blower; they were always gas.
- burntoutfire 6y agoWarsaw banned them recently. Luckily the authorities started doing something about this nuisance...
- pilsetnieks 6y agoThey are also hugely polluting, more than cars and trucks: https://www.wsj.com/articles/that-ear-splitting-leaf-blower-it-also-emits-more-pollution-than-a-car-1513346400 https://www.wsj.com/articles/that-ear-splitting-leaf-blower-...
- boredumb 6y agoHarleys stock are actually under the legal noise limit (80 decibels i think?) and are generally that loud due to straight exhaust and a specific cam shaft they use to squeeze more performance out of them. My understanding is folks prefer them to be loud so that they can be better noticed by cars and get hit less often. Dirt bikes are around 100 decibels, perform like trash and shouldn't be on the freeway near cars in the first place. Here in Puerto Rico we have herds (20-200) of two stroke bikes that ride together at night for fun. I would gladly trade them for 1000 Harley-Davidsons.
- pivo 6y ago> folks prefer them to be loud so that they can be better noticed by cars and get hit less often If you want to do something that’s too dangerous to do without infuriating everyone around you, maybe you just shouldn’t do it. I don’t think those super loud exhausts are stock either. There are tons of bikers who replace the stock pipes with the loudest ones they can find. I don’t get it at all.
- boredumb 6y agoI think you're right about the straight pipes being after market, but I believe the noise generally comes from the engine configuration firing at uneven intervals that make it unusually distinct.
- asdffdsa 6y agoMotorcycles reduce congestion and emit less carbon emissions than SUVs, sedans, trucks, etc. Sure, loud exhausts shouldn't be used, but banning them without addressing the problem of incompetent drivers only further encourages a bygone car culture that is already arguably too pervasive in our society. As a side note, this line of thinking "[it infuriates others so] maybe you shouldn't do it" leans totalitarian which in turn leads to suboptimal outcomes (since no one person or even organization knows the optimal way of living or organizing society -- e.g. no mortals can play "god" so to speak). Also, many people are "infuriated" by trivial things, so it's not always a good way to live life imagining who these ambiguous others are and also to placate to their imagined sensibilities.
- bengale 6y agoA guy that lived on the street down from mine used to ride his about at night, made my house shake. Was so happy when he seemed to move away.
- arnvald 6y agoFor around a year I lived next to a highway, which was one of the worst rental decisions I've made in my life. There was a constant stream of noise, but with the cars it wasn't a big problem, because it was the same volume all the time, so I quickly got used to it. Motorcycles though were a huge issue! Every 10-15 minutes there was some motorcycle passing that just distracted me from whatever I was doing. I left that apartment as soon as I could.
- the_only_law 6y agoThere’s some asshole in my apartment complex who decided a car with an engine with a startup sound very similar loudness to a passing motorcycle. I just love walking outside to be greeted by that.
- amelius 6y agoAnd the people riding them use earplugs :) https://www.alpinehearingprotection.com/earplugs/motosafe-pro/ https://www.alpinehearingprotection.com/earplugs/motosafe-pr...
- nimbius 6y agoNot for the pipes though. Most riders wear ear plugs for wind noise and traffic noise at highway speed.
- nickysielicki 6y agoI get where you're coming from, but I also believe that loud pipes save lives. Ultimately, is it really that big of a deal?
- dangwu 6y agoIs riding motorcycles really that important if it causes noise pollution and enrages people?
- wl 6y agoInflicting hearing loss on the unconsenting public is a huge deal.
- bdamm 6y agoDenying others sleep is kind of a big deal.
- tawayyyy 6y agoi wouldn't care the lives of the pilots bombing cities.
- sneak 6y agoLoud sounds are annoying to be sure, but this sounds also like a bit of an emotional regulation issue in addition, especially if just writing a comment about the event is enraging you. Stressing about that kind of stuff that you ultimately have little/no control over is an express train to an unhappy life.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoThere might be some truth to this, though I don't know whether we have conscious control of it. There's some evidence to suggest magnesium deficiency can lead to an increase in startle response.
- tawayyyy 6y agoyou have no idea. i can even sympathize with a murderer. you know, self-defense, impulse... can be anything. but this? this is premediated. just one asshat can ruin entire town. these people deserve lifetime-imprisonment after multiple offence.
- wmeredith 6y ago> these people deserve lifetime-imprisonment after multiple offence. You can't be serious when you say that you'd lock someone in a cage for the rest of their life because they broke a noise ordinance.
- tawayyyy 6y agowhy not? prisons are full of people that did much less. why a drug lord gets a life in prison? no one is forcing you to buy drugs. can you say same for these people?
- anigbrowl 6y agoAnyone could break a noise ordinance inadvertently, eg having a party that went on too long or getting carried away on a DIY project. while I'm not endorsing the life imprisonment proposal, deliberately altering your vehicle to make it loud and obnoxious (or plain noxious, as with 'coal roller' pickups that are modified to belch oily smoke in large quantities) is a calculated kind of sadism that exploits the inconvenience and low probability of enforcement to aggravate others to the greatest extent possible.
- dgrcode 6y agoI think this is just not a concern for the general population. There are solutions available if we wanted to address this issue. There could be a restriction on the vehicle. Some European cities have zones with restricted access to vehicles based on their CO2 emissions. There are stickers that you have to put on your windshield to drive into those areas. We could have some "noise emission" regulations that ban some vehicles from driving at certain times, like before 9am or after 7pm. It would be similar to the CO2 emission regulations, there's no need to measure the emissions because you have a sticker that already say what your emission levels are.
- vmception 6y agoHard to enforce those in the US We could make re-registering more difficult or impossible for people with addresses in areas with those kind of ordinances Enthusiasts will have nominal addresses but it can be a deterrent
- CountDrewku 6y agoThey just sound like someone ripping ass to me. Never understood the obsessions with their awful noise. It's not a good exhaust tone at all.