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You've obviously studied this, but having actually lived in a city center police sirens are actually fairly rare. Despite what you say they rarely sound them at

You've obviously studied this, but having actually lived in a city center police sirens are actually fairly rare. Despite what you say they rarely sound them at night unless they really have a need, at least in Nottingham. Much worse for causing often unexpected and very grating noise were: 1. Bin men, especially now they collect glass 2. Diesel black cabs having to put their foot down to get up a hill 3. Taxis idling outside your window waiting for a pickup or just waiting for their next dispatch on double yellows in middle of night 4. Scaffolding being put up or taken down. Incredibly noisy, actually has to be done fairly regularly, many companies illegally do this at the weekend in the early morning as it's a part time job for them 5. Skateboarders, one of the most anti-social hobbies for everyone else around them [1] I lived on a bit of a hill, which caused 2 and attracted 5. Since moving to a village again my sleep quality improved overnight. I didn't realize quite how badly it was affecting me. [1] As it seems to be causing confusion, the anti-social behaviour is against non-skateboarders "Environmental antisocial behaviour is when a person’s actions affect the wider environment, such as public spaces or buildings." https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/asb/asb/antisocial-behaviour/what-is-antisocial-behaviour/ https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/asb/...

deleted 4y ago
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diordiderot 4y ago
6. Mopeds
chronogram 4y ago
The only Nottingham I know is in the UK, and the UK is specifically mentioned by GP.
NeutralForest 4y ago
Depends on the city, I'm not far from a hospital as well as a police station and the noise it generates is intense. The ambulances more so than the police. Bikes (mostly mopeds) are really really annoying as well, some of them, I don't know why or how generate insane amounts of noise. Agreed on the scaffolding and overall works, I blame the random urban planning.
- konschubert 4y ago
  I think for new mopeds they should be required to be electric starting 2026. Mopeds don't need big batteries and the batteries can be taken out and charged at home. It's really the perfect vehicle to electrify. Yes, it will make them slightly more expensive at start but it will remove a huge burden of noise and smell from the communities.
  - bbarn 4y ago
    Modern E-bikes can definitely compete with mopeds, and I think will ultimately replace them, once cost starts to go down. The majority of the mopeds on the roads in most places and 20+ years old and likely in use because they are so easy to keep running. I think it was the first thing I learned how to fix as a kid.
    - eric_h 4y ago
      I haven’t seen a moped in NYC in, I think, years. Delivery guys all drive electric bikes, electric scooters or ICE scooters. None of them are a noise issue.
- cameronh90 4y ago
  I live on a main road but have good double glazing. However, there are a few things I can still hear: * Sirens - though these are relatively infrequent and necessary so I don't mind them. * People playing music extremely loudly. I can feel the bass vibrations even though I'm more than 10 metres from the road. * Lorries with unbalanced loads. * Motorbikes/mopeds with modified exhausts.
herodoturtle 4y ago
> 5. Skateboarders, one of the most anti-social hobbies I hear you - skateboarders skating on the street can be a nuisance sometimes, and yes they make a racket - but that's precisely why skate parks are such a great addition to a community. That said, calling skateboarding an anti-social hobby is a bit misleading; on the contrary it's a highly social hobby, and in many ways can be socially uplifting. In the part of town where I grew up, skateboarding gave my friends and I something enjoyable to do, that kept us fit - and crucially - kept us away from other more destructive past-times typically associated with rebellious teenagers (drinking, drugs etc.). I don't mean to pick a fight here. Just felt it was necessary to better represent skateboarding culture (as a past skateboarder, who owes some of his success to the benefits that hobby provided at a very critical time in my life).
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  Chiming in to totally agree. At the start of the year I had no local friends and was just starting to meet people. I matched with someone online who was part of a local queer skater group, and we met and got along. Then suddenly I had a huge group of people where there’s always someone skating Saturday and Sunday every weekend. This made it super easy for me to drop in to a social group any time I wanted, and for months that’s where I was every weekend. The queer skater group is one contingent of a larger group of skaters, so in all there’s usually a good 30 people hanging out and skating together every weekend. It’s a huge new social group for me and they throw events with donations from local skate shops, they do board swaps and clothing swaps, have Instagram groups and photographers. I laughed when I read “anti-social”. The skateboarding group I connected with is the biggest social group I have!
  - trgn 4y ago
    I think that is misreading the original comment. Skateboarding is antisocial because skateboarders are inflicting a noisy hobby on the neighbors. It has nothing to do with whether the skateboarder will make friends or not.
    - keerthiko 4y ago
Emma_Goldman 4y ago
Couldn't disagree more about skateboarding. It's usually just friends hanging out having fun, it's a very leisurely, social past time. It hardly produces any noise, so I have no idea why you've listed it on this thread.
- mattmanser 4y ago
  It generates a huge amount of noise, this feels like absolute gaslighting. Even just going flat a skateboard is incredibly noisy, as soon as people start doing jumps or tricks it's ridiculously noisy. And incredibly repetitive, people trying to do the same trick over and over again.
  - piva00 4y ago
    Huge? It generates noise, as most activities in a city generate noise. Yeah, grinding on rails can be noisy, kicking the board can be noisy but huge amount of noise is a tad much... I feel that if you live in a city you either understand that it's going to be somewhat noisy or you'll go insane, skateboarding generates much less noise than any street traffic.
    - trgn 4y ago
      > I feel that if you live in a city you either understand that it's going to be somewhat noisy or you'll go insane This is the perfect Rorschach test. I refuse to accept this premise, that a city is noisy by default. The city is noisy because we have allowed power tools to dominate (cars, motorcycles, sirenes, ACs, ...). Today is actually somewhat of an improvement, not that long ago the city had heavy industry too: saw mills, foundries, ... But none of that is required. The aspirational city of the future will be the one of the pre-industrial age, but with good sanitation. It is the big galvanizing project of virtually every European city now; it is pushing out cars. It's a real reduction of overall noise, and just, less tangible, but also a real reduction of that low-key trashyness and sociopathy that just seems to seep in into every urban environment where cars dominate. America is way behind, but it _will_ happen. The future of NYC for example will undoubtedly be one without cars for personal transport. A downstream effect is, that as the city effectively becomes more quiet because power tools get pushed out, tolerance for noisy hobbies (like skateboarding) is decreasing as well.
jl6 4y ago
An excellent list, to which I would add barking dogs.
- dazc 4y ago
  The UK is now worse than Spain for this problem, and that's saying something. Sadly, it's gotten beyond the point where any politician would dare raise it as an issue.
- cameronh90 4y ago
  Foxes mating is also incredibly loud.
rtpg 4y ago
all the debate in sibling threads makes me want to put up some mics and some classification system to try and determine what the "answer" is in different cities and areas. There's definitely noises everywhere, but I recently saw a clip of Paris doing a carfree zone thing and it was _sooooo_ quiet, it makes me think that basically cars are the thing that do most of the damage.
- Fradow 4y ago
  I can confirm first-hand that it's the main noise pollution source there. As I stated in a sibling thread, 3 of the 4 sources I cited come from motorized vehicles: mopeds, general ICE noise, honking (in that order). This is better explained by NotJustBikes video "Cities aren't loud: cars are loud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
hulitu 4y ago
I guess depends on the village. Here there are 2 big noise polluters: agricultural machines and Audi drivers.
- dazc 4y ago
  Audi drivers are the scourge of humanity.
bluescrn 4y ago
The proliferation of speed bumps is also a noise problem. Living on a relatively busy street, it's very clear that they increase traffic noise significantly. Some vehicles/loads clatter as they go over the bump, some drivers brake/accelerate aggressively. A constant speed engine/road noise would be much less irritating. Especially in the early hours of the morning. If speeding is a problem, cameras would be a better solution. But that would cost more...
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Unfortunately, cameras increase the ticketing, but not reduce the problem that much. Speed bumps are both the most economical and most effective speeding solution in the city, because the "reward" for speeding is both immediate and possibly damaging. Yes, it's a noise nuisance and comfort nuisance for the law abiding people (I drive through quite a few of them, everyday), but speeding people are much more dangerous IMHO.
  - cjrp 4y ago
    Part of the problem is you usually can't drive over them at or even close to the speed limit. Especially for vans. So you either get them slowing down (squeaky brakes) and then accelerating (clattery diesel), or they smash over the bump and you hear the undertray scraping the ground.
    - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      Most trucks and vans can take most speed bumps at the speed limit (which is usually 25 or less anywhere there's speed bumps in the first place) with no ill effects other than accelerated wear and tear if the driver is so inclined...
      - giantg2 4y ago
        I've never seen a speed bump that I would want to hit anywhere near 25 mph. Even speed humps are more like 10 mph max.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Much worse for causing often unexpected and very grating noise were: That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing your list. I think that if everybody contributed a Top-10 noise hate list they would be quite different and quite specific to location, culture and personality. There is actually a branch of sound psychology on noise "annoyance" that is used in court cases and local authority noise abatement decisions. Although there are common factors like the spectral flux, prominence of high or low frequencies, repetitiveness etc, there are also personal psychological factors, and these dominate. For example, I live by a skate park. But I like to take my daughter there with her board to (feels like I'm not 50 when I can hang out with the cool kids :), so anyway, I am not averse when I hear kids boarding down my street. How much noises annoy us is linked to the social identification and sense of how much control or participation we have. For example, if you get on well with a neighbour who has occasional noisy parties you don't mind, because you feel you could ask them to turn it down, or just go and join them for a while. But strangers who never speak to their neighbours are likely to feel threatened and get annoyed. Even though they would probably turn it down if you asked politely these situations can escalate into violence.
- alisonatwork 4y ago
  My top list is 1) dogs, 2) babies, 3) lawnmowers/leafblowers/etc. This is why I hate living in areas with a lot of single-family homes. I find that kind of screeching noise pollution much more grating than loud music, trains or heavy machinery - stuff that tends to occupy a lower frequency range. That said, it absolutely seems reasonable to have a decibel limit on vehicles, in particular to catch the antisocial people who deliberately tune their cars or motorcycles to be as obnoxiously loud as possible. Although, I was under the impression that in most places it was already illegal to register private vehicles that exceeded a maximum noise threshold, and that it would be tested during the annual vehicle inspection. Apparently not?
Engineering-MD 4y ago
I’d agree, especially bin men. But as an addition when living in the suburbs, bloody pigeons ‘hooing’ is what wakes me at 5am everyday. They are part of nature, but are the worst for me.
jollybean 4y ago
In North America I never hear police sirens, even in a noisy metro. In urban Germany, I could hear them all day. There's something about the '4 story / narrow streets / high density' that reverberates sounds, there's also something uniquely blistering about their sirens, finally, I think they just put them on for any reason. Being pulled over in Canada I just see the lights, often no siren at all.
- cameronh90 4y ago
  My experience in London and NYC is the opposite. In NYC there was rarely a time that I couldn't hear a siren. I figured it was because of the very long, straight roads with unbroken sight lines and the curious way American emergency vehicles seem to leave the siren on all the time. In London I live on a main road but only hear them a few times a day, only for a second as they go past, and rarely at night. Quite a lot of emergency vehicles drive past, but they usually have the siren turned off for the small area where they're audible to me.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > In London I live on a main road but only hear them a few times a day Couple of hundred yards off Old Kent Road and yeah, similar experience - although they do tend to come in bunches around here, it's generally over in a minute or two.
- donthellbanme 4y ago
- april_22 4y ago
  Also have a quite opposite experience. Lived in rural Germany for years and even seeing a police car on the road was something special. You could almost never hear police cars. In all major cities I have been you could hear sirens all day, which also makes sense considering population density etc.
s8s8discourse 4y ago
> 4. Scaffolding being put up or taken down. Incredibly noisy, actually has to be done fairly regularly, many companies illegally do this at the weekend in the early morning as it's a part time job for them It's incredibly unlikely that a scaffolder operating in the city, during the weekend, is a part-timer. What you are seeing is the side effect of too much work, too little time, and the natural progression of staging. Work on one "lift" (one floor height) of scaffolding progresses during the week. The "scaffs" come in on Saturday to raise to the next lift, ready for work to resume on Monday. Your crews are out doing smaller jobs during the week but all come in for a shift on Saturday to knock out a lift on a big site together. And this isn't illegal. The local authority is responsible for setting guidelines, and those guidelines are used to inform enforcement notices that can prohibit a site's activities between hours _retrospectively if they're found to be excessive_. Excessive is a high bar for an enforcement agent standing 100ft below a scaffolder with a decibel meter trying to hear his impact gun over the drum of a bus rolling past. The core guidelines are unlimited noisy work 8am to 1pm on Saturday. Work to be "avoided" on Sunday.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  Outside any major construction site in Tokyo, you will find a noise meter. I assume it is required by law and penalties are steep. The basis for my assumptions? Each time that I saw an enormous lorry approach a work site, the whole "welcoming" crew was very tense. Literally, the driver attempts to coach the lorry with the bare minimum amount of sound -- no revving the engine or changing gears. Also, I rarely heard the "back up beeps" because they will surround the truck with people in yellow safety vests. Plus, one or more people might be spraying tyres to reduce dust. It is quite a ballet to watch!
Beltalowda 4y ago
> You've obviously studied this, but having actually lived in a city center police sirens are actually fairly rare. Despite what you say they rarely sound them at night unless they really have a need, at least in Nottingham. Where I lived in Bristol they were surprisingly common; when I had video calls people noticed and it became a bit of a running gag with my coworkers. Also lots of police helicopters (sometimes in the middle of the night) that kept circling for half an hour or more. Never had it anywhere else though. AFAIK I didn't live anywhere near a police station, but I think the road near my house was often used to get to the city centre (in spite of not being that large). Interestingly, I never personally experienced any problems with any of the other issues you mentioned, except cars (not taxis) idling; I often had people stop in the parking lot to make a phone call safely (great!) but they left the engine on for 20 minutes (less great).
- april_22 4y ago
  One of the main and most disturbing sound issues we have in Germany are churches. One church near to my home rings EVERY 15 Minutes, EVERY day from 7am to 6pm. Wanting to sleep in on a Sunday? Not possible. Wanting to do a quick nap after lunch? Not possible. There have been a couple of noise complaints but somehow still nothing is changing.
  - switch007 4y ago
    Do you also pay church tax for the privilege?
    - ArnoVW 4y ago
      I believe you can designate the state as the recipient of the 'church tax'. For example if you're atheist..
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    Those churches have probably been there ringing their bells since before noise complaints were a formal thing. Why should they let people moving in (who could have known the situation) drive them out?
Symbiote 4y ago
I used to live on a pedestrian street used by skateboarders, also containing a glass recycling bin. Emptying the glass bin was loud, but the noise lasted 5 seconds roughly once per week. I don't care about that. The skateboarders were a very minor annoyance, and I accepted it as part of living in the centre of a city where there were very, very few residents. The sound was confined pretty much to that single street, unlike vehicle-type noises which seem to travel much further.
jtbayly 4y ago
I live in the suburbs, and the trash man comes at 3:30am. I kid you not. Drives us crazy.
- gadders 4y ago
  Ours comes about 8am, but I don't get up until 8.30am when I am WFH. The worse thing about our bin lorry though is it has to reverse down the drive to the cluster of houses where I live so we get the constant "Beep..beep..beep" as it backs up.
ne0flex 4y ago
>having actually lived in a city center police sirens are actually fairly rare. Not sure about other cities, however sirens in NYC are a daily occurance. Living in Manhattan, I hear sirens at least once a day minimum. In fact, I just heard a siren while typing up this comment.
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  I live in suburban America, and hear fire sirens go off several times a day since they are also 911 first responders for every medical emergency, there are fire stations about two-three miles from me in three different directions which might be a regional specific thing.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    I lived 1000ft from a fire station that was running it's siren at least ten times a day. This was also within 1000ft of a (diesel) commuter rail station. The train horns fade into the background but the siren was always a disturbance.
lkbm 4y ago
> You've obviously studied this, but having actually lived in a city center police sirens are actually fairly rare. Despite what you say they rarely sound them at night unless they really have a need, at least in Nottingham. I do think it's highly variable by city. People from NYC will talk about hearing sirens multiple times a day (and night), whereas here in Austin I'll go days—often weeks—without hearing one.
MockObject 4y ago
Here in NYC, skaters wouldn't surface on my top 50 list of noise sources. I enjoy hearing the lads getting fresh air, and I always stop and wonder at their skills. But vehicles with bad brakes, emitting horrible piercing screeches!
metadat 4y ago
This claim conflicts with my real life experience. I lived in SF and the 24/7 sirens of SOMA were unbearable.
Fradow 4y ago
> 4. Scaffolding being put up or taken down. Incredibly noisy, actually has to be done fairly regularly [...] The fact that it has to be done fairly regularly is not inevitable. It's a consequence of some arguable laws in some cities (NYC for example). Living in Paris, I can't recall ever being disturbed by scaffolding being put up or taken down. The scaffolding I see generally stays up for months at a time until the work is finished, which means it's only being put up and taken down once. And it's not frequent to see scaffolding. A big item missing from that list is mopeds (and, to a lesser extent, other loud 2-wheelers, which are less frequent). A lot of food delivery workers use those all day and night round, and they are very loud. As others have said, someone's list is heavily influenced by where they live. All the items you listed are generally not a big issue to me (mopeds, general ICE noise, honking and random alarms are the main culprits). Edit: clarification, "ICE" means internal combustion engine here. Electric vehicles are nearly silent at low speed and don't contribute to noise.
banannaise 4y ago
There's nothing wrong with skateboarding, or with a lot of other "layabout" sort of activities. The problem is that people aren't being given public spaces for social activities, leaving them with the choice to do them in a space that's annoying for others or not at all. Skateboarding, in fact, is one of the least impactful of these activities, which is part of why it's relatively popular - you can actually do it within the confines of the modern cramped city, as opposed to, say, baseball, or frisbee. What do you think would happen if a bunch of kids started playing hockey on a city street?
aiisjustanif 4y ago
Lived in Nottingham, I beg to differ on the Lenton Blvd side. I would here a siren at least twice a week. However, noise in NYC is much worse and you hear sirens, motorcycles, cars revving, etc. all the time in most large US cities.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

diordiderot 4y ago

6. Mopeds

chronogram 4y ago

The only Nottingham I know is in the UK, and the UK is specifically mentioned by GP.

NeutralForest 4y ago

Depends on the city, I'm not far from a hospital as well as a police station and the noise it generates is intense. The ambulances more so than the police. Bikes (mostly mopeds) are really really annoying as well, some of them, I don't know why or how generate insane amounts of noise. Agreed on the scaffolding and overall works, I blame the random urban planning.

konschubert 4y ago
I think for new mopeds they should be required to be electric starting 2026. Mopeds don't need big batteries and the batteries can be taken out and charged at home. It's really the perfect vehicle to electrify. Yes, it will make them slightly more expensive at start but it will remove a huge burden of noise and smell from the communities.
- bbarn 4y ago
  Modern E-bikes can definitely compete with mopeds, and I think will ultimately replace them, once cost starts to go down. The majority of the mopeds on the roads in most places and 20+ years old and likely in use because they are so easy to keep running. I think it was the first thing I learned how to fix as a kid.
  - eric_h 4y ago
    I haven’t seen a moped in NYC in, I think, years. Delivery guys all drive electric bikes, electric scooters or ICE scooters. None of them are a noise issue.
cameronh90 4y ago
I live on a main road but have good double glazing. However, there are a few things I can still hear: * Sirens - though these are relatively infrequent and necessary so I don't mind them. * People playing music extremely loudly. I can feel the bass vibrations even though I'm more than 10 metres from the road. * Lorries with unbalanced loads. * Motorbikes/mopeds with modified exhausts.

herodoturtle 4y ago

> 5. Skateboarders, one of the most anti-social hobbies I hear you - skateboarders skating on the street can be a nuisance sometimes, and yes they make a racket - but that's precisely why skate parks are such a great addition to a community. That said, calling skateboarding an anti-social hobby is a bit misleading; on the contrary it's a highly social hobby, and in many ways can be socially uplifting. In the part of town where I grew up, skateboarding gave my friends and I something enjoyable to do, that kept us fit - and crucially - kept us away from other more destructive past-times typically associated with rebellious teenagers (drinking, drugs etc.). I don't mean to pick a fight here. Just felt it was necessary to better represent skateboarding culture (as a past skateboarder, who owes some of his success to the benefits that hobby provided at a very critical time in my life).

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Chiming in to totally agree. At the start of the year I had no local friends and was just starting to meet people. I matched with someone online who was part of a local queer skater group, and we met and got along. Then suddenly I had a huge group of people where there’s always someone skating Saturday and Sunday every weekend. This made it super easy for me to drop in to a social group any time I wanted, and for months that’s where I was every weekend. The queer skater group is one contingent of a larger group of skaters, so in all there’s usually a good 30 people hanging out and skating together every weekend. It’s a huge new social group for me and they throw events with donations from local skate shops, they do board swaps and clothing swaps, have Instagram groups and photographers. I laughed when I read “anti-social”. The skateboarding group I connected with is the biggest social group I have!
- trgn 4y ago
  I think that is misreading the original comment. Skateboarding is antisocial because skateboarders are inflicting a noisy hobby on the neighbors. It has nothing to do with whether the skateboarder will make friends or not.
  - keerthiko 4y ago

Emma_Goldman 4y ago

Couldn't disagree more about skateboarding. It's usually just friends hanging out having fun, it's a very leisurely, social past time. It hardly produces any noise, so I have no idea why you've listed it on this thread.

mattmanser 4y ago
It generates a huge amount of noise, this feels like absolute gaslighting. Even just going flat a skateboard is incredibly noisy, as soon as people start doing jumps or tricks it's ridiculously noisy. And incredibly repetitive, people trying to do the same trick over and over again.
- piva00 4y ago
  Huge? It generates noise, as most activities in a city generate noise. Yeah, grinding on rails can be noisy, kicking the board can be noisy but huge amount of noise is a tad much... I feel that if you live in a city you either understand that it's going to be somewhat noisy or you'll go insane, skateboarding generates much less noise than any street traffic.
  - trgn 4y ago
    > I feel that if you live in a city you either understand that it's going to be somewhat noisy or you'll go insane This is the perfect Rorschach test. I refuse to accept this premise, that a city is noisy by default. The city is noisy because we have allowed power tools to dominate (cars, motorcycles, sirenes, ACs, ...). Today is actually somewhat of an improvement, not that long ago the city had heavy industry too: saw mills, foundries, ... But none of that is required. The aspirational city of the future will be the one of the pre-industrial age, but with good sanitation. It is the big galvanizing project of virtually every European city now; it is pushing out cars. It's a real reduction of overall noise, and just, less tangible, but also a real reduction of that low-key trashyness and sociopathy that just seems to seep in into every urban environment where cars dominate. America is way behind, but it _will_ happen. The future of NYC for example will undoubtedly be one without cars for personal transport. A downstream effect is, that as the city effectively becomes more quiet because power tools get pushed out, tolerance for noisy hobbies (like skateboarding) is decreasing as well.

jl6 4y ago

An excellent list, to which I would add barking dogs.

dazc 4y ago
The UK is now worse than Spain for this problem, and that's saying something. Sadly, it's gotten beyond the point where any politician would dare raise it as an issue.
cameronh90 4y ago
Foxes mating is also incredibly loud.

rtpg 4y ago

all the debate in sibling threads makes me want to put up some mics and some classification system to try and determine what the "answer" is in different cities and areas. There's definitely noises everywhere, but I recently saw a clip of Paris doing a carfree zone thing and it was _sooooo_ quiet, it makes me think that basically cars are the thing that do most of the damage.

Fradow 4y ago
I can confirm first-hand that it's the main noise pollution source there. As I stated in a sibling thread, 3 of the 4 sources I cited come from motorized vehicles: mopeds, general ICE noise, honking (in that order). This is better explained by NotJustBikes video "Cities aren't loud: cars are loud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

hulitu 4y ago

I guess depends on the village. Here there are 2 big noise polluters: agricultural machines and Audi drivers.

dazc 4y ago
Audi drivers are the scourge of humanity.

bluescrn 4y ago

The proliferation of speed bumps is also a noise problem. Living on a relatively busy street, it's very clear that they increase traffic noise significantly. Some vehicles/loads clatter as they go over the bump, some drivers brake/accelerate aggressively. A constant speed engine/road noise would be much less irritating. Especially in the early hours of the morning. If speeding is a problem, cameras would be a better solution. But that would cost more...

bayindirh 4y ago
Unfortunately, cameras increase the ticketing, but not reduce the problem that much. Speed bumps are both the most economical and most effective speeding solution in the city, because the "reward" for speeding is both immediate and possibly damaging. Yes, it's a noise nuisance and comfort nuisance for the law abiding people (I drive through quite a few of them, everyday), but speeding people are much more dangerous IMHO.
- cjrp 4y ago
  Part of the problem is you usually can't drive over them at or even close to the speed limit. Especially for vans. So you either get them slowing down (squeaky brakes) and then accelerating (clattery diesel), or they smash over the bump and you hear the undertray scraping the ground.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    Most trucks and vans can take most speed bumps at the speed limit (which is usually 25 or less anywhere there's speed bumps in the first place) with no ill effects other than accelerated wear and tear if the driver is so inclined...
    - giantg2 4y ago
      I've never seen a speed bump that I would want to hit anywhere near 25 mph. Even speed humps are more like 10 mph max.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

> Much worse for causing often unexpected and very grating noise were: That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing your list. I think that if everybody contributed a Top-10 noise hate list they would be quite different and quite specific to location, culture and personality. There is actually a branch of sound psychology on noise "annoyance" that is used in court cases and local authority noise abatement decisions. Although there are common factors like the spectral flux, prominence of high or low frequencies, repetitiveness etc, there are also personal psychological factors, and these dominate. For example, I live by a skate park. But I like to take my daughter there with her board to (feels like I'm not 50 when I can hang out with the cool kids :), so anyway, I am not averse when I hear kids boarding down my street. How much noises annoy us is linked to the social identification and sense of how much control or participation we have. For example, if you get on well with a neighbour who has occasional noisy parties you don't mind, because you feel you could ask them to turn it down, or just go and join them for a while. But strangers who never speak to their neighbours are likely to feel threatened and get annoyed. Even though they would probably turn it down if you asked politely these situations can escalate into violence.

alisonatwork 4y ago
My top list is 1) dogs, 2) babies, 3) lawnmowers/leafblowers/etc. This is why I hate living in areas with a lot of single-family homes. I find that kind of screeching noise pollution much more grating than loud music, trains or heavy machinery - stuff that tends to occupy a lower frequency range. That said, it absolutely seems reasonable to have a decibel limit on vehicles, in particular to catch the antisocial people who deliberately tune their cars or motorcycles to be as obnoxiously loud as possible. Although, I was under the impression that in most places it was already illegal to register private vehicles that exceeded a maximum noise threshold, and that it would be tested during the annual vehicle inspection. Apparently not?

Engineering-MD 4y ago

I’d agree, especially bin men. But as an addition when living in the suburbs, bloody pigeons ‘hooing’ is what wakes me at 5am everyday. They are part of nature, but are the worst for me.

jollybean 4y ago

In North America I never hear police sirens, even in a noisy metro. In urban Germany, I could hear them all day. There's something about the '4 story / narrow streets / high density' that reverberates sounds, there's also something uniquely blistering about their sirens, finally, I think they just put them on for any reason. Being pulled over in Canada I just see the lights, often no siren at all.

cameronh90 4y ago
My experience in London and NYC is the opposite. In NYC there was rarely a time that I couldn't hear a siren. I figured it was because of the very long, straight roads with unbroken sight lines and the curious way American emergency vehicles seem to leave the siren on all the time. In London I live on a main road but only hear them a few times a day, only for a second as they go past, and rarely at night. Quite a lot of emergency vehicles drive past, but they usually have the siren turned off for the small area where they're audible to me.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > In London I live on a main road but only hear them a few times a day Couple of hundred yards off Old Kent Road and yeah, similar experience - although they do tend to come in bunches around here, it's generally over in a minute or two.
donthellbanme 4y ago
april_22 4y ago
Also have a quite opposite experience. Lived in rural Germany for years and even seeing a police car on the road was something special. You could almost never hear police cars. In all major cities I have been you could hear sirens all day, which also makes sense considering population density etc.

s8s8discourse 4y ago

> 4. Scaffolding being put up or taken down. Incredibly noisy, actually has to be done fairly regularly, many companies illegally do this at the weekend in the early morning as it's a part time job for them It's incredibly unlikely that a scaffolder operating in the city, during the weekend, is a part-timer. What you are seeing is the side effect of too much work, too little time, and the natural progression of staging. Work on one "lift" (one floor height) of scaffolding progresses during the week. The "scaffs" come in on Saturday to raise to the next lift, ready for work to resume on Monday. Your crews are out doing smaller jobs during the week but all come in for a shift on Saturday to knock out a lift on a big site together. And this isn't illegal. The local authority is responsible for setting guidelines, and those guidelines are used to inform enforcement notices that can prohibit a site's activities between hours _retrospectively if they're found to be excessive_. Excessive is a high bar for an enforcement agent standing 100ft below a scaffolder with a decibel meter trying to hear his impact gun over the drum of a bus rolling past. The core guidelines are unlimited noisy work 8am to 1pm on Saturday. Work to be "avoided" on Sunday.

throwaway2037 4y ago
Outside any major construction site in Tokyo, you will find a noise meter. I assume it is required by law and penalties are steep. The basis for my assumptions? Each time that I saw an enormous lorry approach a work site, the whole "welcoming" crew was very tense. Literally, the driver attempts to coach the lorry with the bare minimum amount of sound -- no revving the engine or changing gears. Also, I rarely heard the "back up beeps" because they will surround the truck with people in yellow safety vests. Plus, one or more people might be spraying tyres to reduce dust. It is quite a ballet to watch!

Beltalowda 4y ago

> You've obviously studied this, but having actually lived in a city center police sirens are actually fairly rare. Despite what you say they rarely sound them at night unless they really have a need, at least in Nottingham. Where I lived in Bristol they were surprisingly common; when I had video calls people noticed and it became a bit of a running gag with my coworkers. Also lots of police helicopters (sometimes in the middle of the night) that kept circling for half an hour or more. Never had it anywhere else though. AFAIK I didn't live anywhere near a police station, but I think the road near my house was often used to get to the city centre (in spite of not being that large). Interestingly, I never personally experienced any problems with any of the other issues you mentioned, except cars (not taxis) idling; I often had people stop in the parking lot to make a phone call safely (great!) but they left the engine on for 20 minutes (less great).

april_22 4y ago
One of the main and most disturbing sound issues we have in Germany are churches. One church near to my home rings EVERY 15 Minutes, EVERY day from 7am to 6pm. Wanting to sleep in on a Sunday? Not possible. Wanting to do a quick nap after lunch? Not possible. There have been a couple of noise complaints but somehow still nothing is changing.
- switch007 4y ago
  Do you also pay church tax for the privilege?
  - ArnoVW 4y ago
    I believe you can designate the state as the recipient of the 'church tax'. For example if you're atheist..
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  Those churches have probably been there ringing their bells since before noise complaints were a formal thing. Why should they let people moving in (who could have known the situation) drive them out?

Symbiote 4y ago

I used to live on a pedestrian street used by skateboarders, also containing a glass recycling bin. Emptying the glass bin was loud, but the noise lasted 5 seconds roughly once per week. I don't care about that. The skateboarders were a very minor annoyance, and I accepted it as part of living in the centre of a city where there were very, very few residents. The sound was confined pretty much to that single street, unlike vehicle-type noises which seem to travel much further.

jtbayly 4y ago

I live in the suburbs, and the trash man comes at 3:30am. I kid you not. Drives us crazy.

gadders 4y ago
Ours comes about 8am, but I don't get up until 8.30am when I am WFH. The worse thing about our bin lorry though is it has to reverse down the drive to the cluster of houses where I live so we get the constant "Beep..beep..beep" as it backs up.

ne0flex 4y ago

>having actually lived in a city center police sirens are actually fairly rare. Not sure about other cities, however sirens in NYC are a daily occurance. Living in Manhattan, I hear sirens at least once a day minimum. In fact, I just heard a siren while typing up this comment.

stevenwoo 4y ago
I live in suburban America, and hear fire sirens go off several times a day since they are also 911 first responders for every medical emergency, there are fire stations about two-three miles from me in three different directions which might be a regional specific thing.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  I lived 1000ft from a fire station that was running it's siren at least ten times a day. This was also within 1000ft of a (diesel) commuter rail station. The train horns fade into the background but the siren was always a disturbance.

lkbm 4y ago

> You've obviously studied this, but having actually lived in a city center police sirens are actually fairly rare. Despite what you say they rarely sound them at night unless they really have a need, at least in Nottingham. I do think it's highly variable by city. People from NYC will talk about hearing sirens multiple times a day (and night), whereas here in Austin I'll go days—often weeks—without hearing one.

MockObject 4y ago

Here in NYC, skaters wouldn't surface on my top 50 list of noise sources. I enjoy hearing the lads getting fresh air, and I always stop and wonder at their skills. But vehicles with bad brakes, emitting horrible piercing screeches!

metadat 4y ago

This claim conflicts with my real life experience. I lived in SF and the 24/7 sirens of SOMA were unbearable.

Fradow 4y ago

> 4. Scaffolding being put up or taken down. Incredibly noisy, actually has to be done fairly regularly [...] The fact that it has to be done fairly regularly is not inevitable. It's a consequence of some arguable laws in some cities (NYC for example). Living in Paris, I can't recall ever being disturbed by scaffolding being put up or taken down. The scaffolding I see generally stays up for months at a time until the work is finished, which means it's only being put up and taken down once. And it's not frequent to see scaffolding. A big item missing from that list is mopeds (and, to a lesser extent, other loud 2-wheelers, which are less frequent). A lot of food delivery workers use those all day and night round, and they are very loud. As others have said, someone's list is heavily influenced by where they live. All the items you listed are generally not a big issue to me (mopeds, general ICE noise, honking and random alarms are the main culprits). Edit: clarification, "ICE" means internal combustion engine here. Electric vehicles are nearly silent at low speed and don't contribute to noise.

banannaise 4y ago

There's nothing wrong with skateboarding, or with a lot of other "layabout" sort of activities. The problem is that people aren't being given public spaces for social activities, leaving them with the choice to do them in a space that's annoying for others or not at all. Skateboarding, in fact, is one of the least impactful of these activities, which is part of why it's relatively popular - you can actually do it within the confines of the modern cramped city, as opposed to, say, baseball, or frisbee. What do you think would happen if a bunch of kids started playing hockey on a city street?

aiisjustanif 4y ago

Lived in Nottingham, I beg to differ on the Lenton Blvd side. I would here a siren at least twice a week. However, noise in NYC is much worse and you hear sirens, motorcycles, cars revving, etc. all the time in most large US cities.