Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
view the rest of the comments
I've seen stats from Switzerland (IIRC) that said 70% of vehicles breaking noise limits where motorbikes. 20% were trucks and busses. 10% were cars. You want to address transport noise? Get rid of bikers.
It's nice to see that it's getting some attention but I've been seeing stories about this for years. We will be long dead before this is addressed, let alone solved.
The stats sound about right, based on general world experience.
What those don't address is quantity per category. There's way more cars than motorbikes on the roads (in Switzerland and most EU/North America areas).
The loudest part of a car is usually (assuming it's got a legal muffler) the wheels in contact while rolling at speed. So, while few cars might be breaking a sound law individually, the sheer quantity of cars driving fast makes for the general cacophony you hear in the city. It's then punctuated with motorbikes, car horns, and leaf blowers. That basic rumble you can never escape is just the tires of the cars rolling along.
Also assholes playing loud music. The only reason for that is because you're attention starved. Turn the music down and go get a hug you dicks.
This is an important factor. Most of the comments seem to be fixating on motorbikes as one of the biggest sources of noise pollution based on sound intensity. I understand this, but it doesn't speak to my experience.
From my apartment I can rarely hear a motorbike, while the car noise is near-constant. I sometimes close my windows during the day specifically because of this. I find it overstimulating not due to its intensity, but due to the unending nature of it. 'That basic rumble you can never escape' is a good way to put it.
So, for someone in the same situation (which would be most people living in a city) removing noise caused by cars would lead to a much more significant quality-of-life improvement compared to removing its motorbike counterpart. Even if motorbikes are louder.