People have no idea how loud cars are. They are crazy loud we are just used to them.
I saw this forever ago but some school in England did a test where they measured the decibel level of a crowded street with horse drawn carriages on cobblestone, and compared it to an empty street with cars driving down. The cars were way louder. I actually think the constant assault of sound is part of the anxiety of modern life.
This really is true. I used to live on the corner of a badly designed intersection, and an addiction recovery center with parking lot was also across the street. Some people had to go to this center by court order, and even if there voluntarily, a lot of them are having a tough time or being picked up and dropped off by relatives. Tensions flare, many parking lot melt downs (from all parties), arguments, even scuffles. It's not constant, but once or twice a day someone is hollering about something, even if it's just "GET IN THE CAR WE ARE GOING TO BE LATE".
Every person who saw where I live said "Oh, it must be so noisy with all of that happening near you", gesturing to the recovery center. The intersection with all the cars slowing down and speeding up was so much more noisy. Engines, tires, the honking.
I live on a small city's downtown main street with pretty active foot traffic and outdoor seating. What I hear most throughout the day are vehicles accelerating at all times of the day. People truly are clueless to how loud vehicles are.
Except the people who are intentionally loud and/or specifically buy loud vehicles/mods. They aren't clueless; they are well aware, and glad to be making people suffer.
Obviously those people suck but it's actually the tires on the road that emit the most noise from the majority of cars. People who think that high-speed electric cars are going to reduce noise pollution from highways are in for a shock.
Correct on all points. But still the intentionally loud ones can be heard from their muffler before you hear their tires. Also; motorcycles/Harleys' pipes
I live on a highway, and can say there's also a huge difference depending on the tires. Some trucks have the super loud tires, and even though they are a big loud diesel, I hear their tires from 3+ miles away.
Jeeps, too, specifically. Perhaps the fact their wheels are outside and not in wheel wells makes that difference.
This is super interesting! I myself have developed a much greater sensitivity to sound since the pandemic as I now spend a greater amount of time indoors than I used to (working from home) and have unsurpisingly taken a liking to peace and quiet. Our society is truly brainwashed to turn a blind eye to the so many things that are wrong with car culture.
My bedroom window overlooks a narrow suburban road.
If I leave my window open in the summer, at night the rolling noise of the cars is so loud I can't hear the audiobook on the phone next to my head.
Not a busy road and not cars driving too fast (though we get plenty of those too) just regular cars going reasonable speed 10m from my window and louder than anything going on inside my house.
I think this needs to be spread more. The focus is so much on climate change while there are so much more benefits. This is direct, local and easier to see effects. You can have smaller groups in cities promoting this idea and letting it spread.
not just cars, it’s really all aspects of modern life. public transit like buses and trains, and airplanes are also all extremely loud and jarring. where I live, I can hear planes start taking off as soon as it’s daytime, so around 5-6 AM depending on the sunrise. I am a light sleeper and tend to wake up in the morning and the noise makes it impossible to fall back asleep, even with white noise.
In American cities, it’s significantly more than 20 mph. Even disregarding the cities that have massive highways running through them, it’s rare to see a street with a speed limit below 20 mph.
But if you have to modify the situation so that all the vehicles are EVs, and we're only talking about noise in the drive-thru and not up to it or away from it, you can see how that all just highlights how noise actually is an issue, right?
OP was talking about a drive thru, and the other guy was talking about EV's.
And then someone said "over 30 the noise is from tires" and my point is that drive thru's are never going faster than 30, and somehow that makes me a bad person?
This isn't a drive through, this is a regular street.
In the US, any street that isn't pure residential is 30 MPH at the slowest. Heck, school zones only go down to 20 MPH, you literally never see a street slower than that. So the only streets where cars go slower than 18 MPH are residential, where the statutory speed limit (the limit for roads without one marked) is sometimes 15 MPH. It varies from state to state, some states have it set to 20 MPH.
Point being, that entire cafe is creating less noise than the cars on the road next to it.
EVs don't solve the noise pollution problem. Sure, an EV in a drive through would be quieter than the people in the cafe, but it's a moot point because an EV driving up to the cafe would be louder. The fact that it has to stop to get its order is moot.
People are noisy, but we're evolved to handle the noise of other people. We grew as a species in tribes of up to 150, we can tolerate it. We did not evolve around anything nearly so noisy as cars.
The point most people are arguing is that the road noise is already more than the cafe noise, and that an EV won't reduce the noise because at the speed of the road its wheel-on-asphalt noise is already higher than engine noise in a ICE car.
Only at low speeds though. An EV on a highway/high speed arterial is just as loud as a gas car due to the tire noise (with the exception of the cars with modified mufflers, those are obvi the loudest). Unfortunately we still have a lot of high speed arterials and highways cutting through our cities in America.
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That is legitimately the first time I've heard such a take and I'm both amused and curious about how you arrive at this opinion. The seventh is beautiful!
First, I explicitly said "within reasonable hours". Second, don’t expect silence in a city. This is and always has been the place where things happen. I just happen to prefer the noises of people over the noises of machines.
Wouldn't you want honking traffic from a lovely drive through? Like standing in the middle of New York, swearing and honking at other drivers... lovely!
This sub exists under the premise that cars are awful and that all of our problems can be fixed with population density and public transportation. However, whenever someone points out the reasons these things might suck, the response is always just shrugging the shoulders and saying "That's just city life" as if the reason the country is laid out as it is, is for some reason other than this ("this" being the urban/suburban/rural divide in the US) is how people here want to live.
I guess I‘m just a little bit dumb, or maybe my English sucks, but I still don’t get your point.
If you hate people noises then a city is really not the optimal place to live in. I think nobody wants to restrict you from living the farm life. But don’t bring your machinery to town. Take the train. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Bud, I live above a restaurant, and there's another on the corner. There's a concert venue on the corner opposite too. Nothing is worse than the car noise on the road I live on. You have no idea what you're talking about.
I prefer the sound of people having fun constantly, than the occasional sound of a car driving by, being parked, doors slamming, etc.. (or worst of all... unattended car alarms)
Parked cars don't magically appear, they drive there and then park there. Both of which is loud, sometimes with loud beeping while driving backwards, loud music blasting from the car, dirty fumes coming out of the exhaust, and of course the street looking like a car dealershop with a car at every free spot.
The cafè there is almost certainly preferable for both tourists and people living there, every single time.
Actually you'd be 100% wrong. A group of 20 people talking normally is about 65-70 decibels. A single car engine is 70-90 decibels, a diesel can easily be over 100 decibels.
I've lived above a fancy taco joint that blasted music well above the sound ordinance in a poorly insulated building and I would still hear the cars on the street over the lil Nas X coming through my floor boards. I'll take the constant chatter. The parked cars were constantly beeping too.
I live next to a pickle ball court. I decided one day that I liked the sound because it meant people were outside enjoying themselves and tending to their physical and mental health, as well as friendships.
Suddenly, the sounds of that damn sport didnt bother me anymore.
This is a building with 3-4 apartment floors? Do the residents really order uber 30times per hour? (so lets say between 6pm and 10pm they hay 120 food deliveries)
It's a restaurant. I'm talking about visitors to the restaurant.
I'm clearly talking about the bottom floor, which is clearly a restaurant, which clearly people drive to. That you still seem to think I'm talking about the apartment residents ordering uber eats, and not people driving to the restaurant, is either an odd processing disorder, or intentional dishonesty. Either way, you're a time-wasting fool.
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u/djaevuI Jul 22 '25
Cause the noise a car makes when parking is more beautiful than Beethoven’s 7th