Curbing Traffic is a great book, and I can definitely recommend it: www.modacitylife.com/curbing-traffic Noise pollution is only one chapter of the book. The rest is filled with so many other reasons why we need fewer cars in our cities.
hey, regarding the loud pipes in motorcycles (the most controversial topic regarding noise and motorcycles imho), that myth is kinda debunked. I read an article a few weeks back that shows no correlation between "loud pipes" and saving lives. As a motorcyclist myself, I always argue about that when someone brings it up. If I find the link to it, I will edit this comment to add it. Love the videos, cheers. Edit: could not find the link to the study itself, but found a yt video, that might be from the same people, not sure, but it shows the results of the tests: ua-cam.com/video/v9QTPyMJGgo/v-deo.html
I grew up in the old south neighbourhood in London Ontario, not far from Commissioners road. I remember the students at my Elementary school who lived on commissioners road said that they couldn't sleep well at night during the early fall and spring because the street is so busy.
I don't think anything drives the point home quite as well as showing a cozy looking town square with people strolling about and sitting outside cafés only to cut to how it used to look 20 years ago when it was a bloody fricking car park lmao
Especially when you consider that the amount of people seen in this single shot of a mostly empty square are propably still greater than the total amount of people who used to be able to park their cars there.
@@ligametis people will always talk twice as loud as the environment. One can see this happening in bars when there aren’t a lot of folks in. People tend to talk normal. Then more people come in. The battle begins. The more people or background noise (the bar may in turn also turn up the volume) the louder people will talk. At the end of the evening people are shouting to each other.
@@RustOnWheels Which is why sound absorption panels are a great idea -- if the noise around them stays low, people don't need to talk loud to hear each other.
Here in Vienna, turning one of the main shopping streets (Mariahilfer Straße) into a car free street was a major fight which cost the green party, who pushed for it lots of voters. I remember people on Facebook going insane over that. I usually put a link to an old picture of car free shopping streets that were established earlier - eg. Graben with lots of cars in the 60s into those discussions. And a rhetorical question like "remember when we fought over this?". Because nowadays, *nobody* can remember how bad those streets were and how people thought that turning them car free would be impossible. And nobody wants them back full of cars. In 20 years, nobody will want cars back on Mariahilfer Straße either.
As someone who moved from Cairo, Egypt to a rural town in Minnesota, I can tell you that having low noise and clean air is worth so much more than people think.
Seriously, I visited cairo and the egyptian museum while on vacation and I never had that much noise pollution and bad air. Glad it was only for a day. Buenos Aires was horrible aswell.
The most astounding thing to me, which made me genuinely tear up a bit, was when you walked out of the train station and instead of seeing a parking lot, it opens straight to a sidewalk of sorts. Never in my american life have I seen anything of the sort
haha outside of the mainstation of my hometown (basel), we have tons of trams and buses. as much as i know, our train station is only connected to the public transport, and not to the normal traffic
@@NoGoodHandlesComingToMind But to be fair, NYC and DC are sort of the exceptions and his „American life“ is probably more representative of how most Americans live.
The grass between the tramrails are awesome! They not only reduce sound from the trams, it obviously looks better than asphalt, but also reduces the temperature on a hot day and soaks up lots of water on rainy days and even reduces dust in the air. The biggest reason that most tramrails don't have grass is because they're also used by other traffic, most importantly emergency vehicles like ambulances, police and fire trucks.
When I see those grassy tram lines, I think of North American tourists I’ve seen happily and obliviously walking in dedicated bicycle lanes while cyclists curse at them in unintelligible ‘European’, and I picture those same tourists setting out a picnic blanket to enjoy the nice grassy park that no one else seems to have discovered :p
@@Superdoxin Was about to comment the same. I have driven an ambulance on grass tracks and it's actually a *smoother* ride in most places since it's *not* used by heavy road vehicles, so it doesn't have potholes or wheel ruts.
@@Superdoxin not every construction of grass tracks works as an extra emergency lane. the most important criterion is if the rails are elevated or sunk into the plane. There is a German wikipedia article on the different constructions of grass tracks, if you can work with that. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasengleis
"Car Horns should be just as loud on the inside of the car than the outside". YES. I've been saying this forever. Such a simple change that would remove *so* much needless honking.
While we’re at it, can we also ban car alarms? I feel like they go off by accident so often that most people associate the noise with ‘clumsy car owner’ instead of ‘car theft in progress’
They should be TWICE as loud inside for the Dutch who visit a friend and 'must' honk their horn when leaving, which the majority do. AND, three times as loud when they do that when I am taking a nap. (I'm old, deal with it)
I always thought I disliked Warsaw, until I got a pair of noise-reducing headphones and suddenly walking in the city was amazing, I actually thought to myself this city is nice. I think noise pollution is a major contributor to how much we do not enjoy our cities.
Warszawa? Personally I feel like there is decent amount of underground tunnels and "alternate roads" (smaller side roads or parks) you can walk through and avoid traffic/noise quite well. It's a city you need to know well to get to enjoy the best of. Poland is doing semi good work at diverting traffic away from city center. All kinds of cobblestone streets and 10km/h limits, (Warsaw is building new bridges and motorways 10km away from the city so less cars would need to pass through), building sound barriers etc. but obviously there is more work to do as always. I fucking love the city and I'm looking forward to the future. But if you meant the Warsaw in USA, then my heart goes out for you.
Yes the city is absolutely infested with cars unfortunately and all the new infrastructure and buildings only serve cars and do not at all consider cyclists or pedestrians
@@Vjilmlllooiiiojol I know you know, I just can't believe they have so many names of cities from Europe. I can already hear an american tourist in Poland saying "oh you have too? Is it named after ours?"
I remember one of the best things about lockdown was going outside in the middle of the day, and it was silent. Not just quiet, nothing was going on, made for very very pleasant walks
I once stopped at the edge of a wind farm on a main road to hear the outrageously loud noise critics said they cause. But all I could hear was traffic noise from the road!
yeah turbines are quiet as shit because they kept growing in diameter and slowing rotation speed you could stand under one and you wouldn't gear much noise
@@catalintimofti1117 I've been under other ones, they were not totally silent, but the noise went down quickly as you moved away. I have read though that a few percent of wind turbines are really quite loud where they operate in turbulent air. But the vast majority operate in smooth air and are quite unobtrusive.
"This man said that a cycle path would spoil the village-like atmosphere of Chiswick, but it was hard to hear him over the roar of traffic." - Jay Foreman
I am fairly certain rewatching all of Unfinished London a bunch brought NotJustBikes to my recommended page. NJB if you're reading this you should 100% collab!
This series has really opened my eyes to how far behind the USA is. The sad part is that it really could be so much better, and there are plenty of places to model from. No place is perfect, but quality of life is everything.
I think the mindset in the US is, "If we didn't come up with the idea, it can't be a good one.". Which would help explain the lack of SO many programs, services, and quality of Life improvements here. . .
@@slate613 unfortunately, I tend to agree with you. The US ego that everything here is soooo much better is really holding the limitless potential back.
The previous generation of boomers ripped up a solid public transportation system and left us with a polluted world in almost every way. We went backwards, and now we are just trying to get back to where it was, and then go up from there.
Ebikes here. My problem is my roommate.. He is.. LOUD! At the end of the street i can hear him, and my room is right next to his, the wall between us.. a thin funer plate. At the same time, he hates it, when im snoring, so... 1:1.
I want to like e-scooters. But the ideer of people just dropping them everywhere and drunk people using them. I think it will get better, but people need to get use to using them properly
As a car enthusiast who enjoys how loud cars can be there definitely is a time and place. As much as I love motor sports, most everything I need to do in my city can be done by bike and really wish more American cities were bike friendly.
I used to hang with an auto enthusiast crowd. Its sad the entire subculture gets labelled by its loudest proponents. Plenty of engineers and restorers will hopefully be vindicated when we become less reliant on everyone owning something almost no one understands.
@@zachweyrauch2988 I wish we had dedicated cycling roads in the United States like the Dutch do. I love cycling (because it is exercise but it is also like driving). I generally hate exercise because I don’t get an endorphin rush like many other people do. I just feel tired and sore. But I love cycling because it reminds me of driving which admittedly I love. I used to go on joyrides all the time when I got my license and first car. Cycling is like a joyride but trying to commute by bike where I live is dangerous. Especially at 4:30 AM (work starts at 6:00 for me).
@@thatcarguy1UZ Thats part of the problem with this video. People shouldnt be forced into desperation when they are willing to work harder for what they need instead of what we need for them. For instance. When i was starting my career i was desperate for work (it was 2012) I took a job that seemed good based on the condition that i buy a car to commute. The job turned out to be an insurance scam and the place they sent me turned out to be a friend of the owner. (i didnt buy my car there) Either way i was now paying for a lemon i didnt need and had the ability to commute for years to awful temp jobs outside the suburban centre i lived in. I would have biked somewhere for less pay and it could have meant the same net gain financially.
@@zachweyrauch2988 that’s yet another problem in this country. The infrastructure is unilaterally set up for automotive use only. It’s dangerous to cycle, and in many places public transportation is not available or is insufficient. There’s no reason why you should need a car to go about your day to day life. And I say this as an avid automotive enthusiast who loves to drive!
The one thing that shocked me most about Tokyo was just how quiet it would get in the city center. My family and I stayed at an AirBnB about 300 meters away from Shibuya Crossing, and we were amazed by how serenely quiet it was. You could never have guessed that the world's busiest intersection was just a short walk away.
Considering that a horn is a warning signal only to be used in emergency situations I'd say it's quite ok that they are very loud. But there definitely should be some sort of mechanism to punish unjustified use of a car horn. Mark Rober once had the suggestion to add a second more casual horn.
I was reading that here in Ontario the increasing popularity of cargo e- bikes is "problematic"..there is a discussion about regulating or banning them...What the hell?! These are the best car replacement.
Only thing with those is they need to build secure e-bike parking. That way people can buy those instead of rent from Bird or whoever. Just only $1000 and parking would cost $100 per year probably, and doesn't require insurance. A dream vehicle.
@@aabb55777 Its illegal in Canada to sell ebikes that can go beyond a certain speed. I think that is a good law. THey should not be able to go faster than a reasonably fast peddle bike on a flat road. As far as I know the USA has no such speed limiters on their ebikes.
@@SongDog9 Eh, maybe it's both. I appreciate the sentiment, but I definitely don't process loud noises or bright lights in the same way that an average person would.
@@eldritchteletubby9319 the average person is desensitized to the noise/light pollution. Humans are normally really sensitive to those things, just like all animals. I had a motorcycle in the past, and back then the noise & oncoming car lights didnt bother me. Now after 2-3 years without a motorcycle & without going to the city, i'm suppeeeer sensitive to noise & bright lights, so much that the noise literally scares me!
@Blondie even i get close to a heart attack if you put me in the middle of a big city 😂 in nature there arent many things happening at the same time, so yes its normal to be overwhelmed by the noises/lights
I love that you show the history as well. I never actually thought most of these countries ever had massive car usage issues. Seeing that massive parking lot turned into a walkable area proves it is insanely possible to fix these issues in the US. Looking at pictures and videos of other countries I have always wished we had those massive empty squares to walk and travel in instead of massive parking lots that are terrifying to walk through.
Parking lots are the least terrifying place in a city to walk. A narrow sidewalk is far worse, but thats not to say that cities should be filled with parking lots, I'm sure Manhattan would be much better off if they just banned all motor vehicles save deliveries to stores during certain times (maybe focus on weekdays while people should be working and not in the streets) and city vehicles (like buses and mass transit).
@@jasonreed7522 every time I enter a parking lot when walking the sidewalk ends, and then it's a free for all of asphalt with cars flying in every direction, not following the lanes, and cars backing out without looking
Note about the beginning of this video. For some (particularly neurodivergent individuals), you don't get "used to" the continuous sound; it actually gets worse. Those with sensory issues/disabilities (i.e., autism, auditory processing, ADHD) often are forced to wear ear protectors/mufflers just to function, and those aids become even more necessary in an urban environment. I personally know that I've had to put on some sort of noise blocker at volumes as low as 70 decibels, so living in a place like the city in Pakistan mentioned would be literal hell. It's not like people who live in the city always have a choice, either; commuting into the city for whatever reason may not be an option. Essentially, anyone, disabled or not, should not be forced to use aids in the place they live.
Having lived near a highly used street, Harley's were really by far the biggest nuissance. Not only their direct sound emissions are higher than anything (except for car horns), but also the induced low-frequency vibrations that are perceivable in the lower floors of nearby houses.
My dad owns a Harley Road King with bunch of aftermarket upgrades, including a high-performance exhaust. Before my parents divorced and he moved out, he would push it a couple hundred feet down the road so as to not wake up the whole house when he started it in the morning.
I used to live in Hawaii which was blissfully peaceful. They opened a huge Harley dealership and rental store in downtown Kailua-Kona which quickly destroyed any quality peace and quiet at all hours of day and night and ruined the entire island for me. Moved.
@@jackrackham3406 Sport bikes usually have valved exhausts such that they are very loud when you open the throttle all the way, but quiet when maintaining a constant speed.
I am a motorcycle rider and I am sick and tired of telling other motorcycle riders that there are no studies that shows that loud exhaust saves lives. I hate loud motorcycles. Unfortunately I have not found a way to reduce noise but to move slower
I can’t say I’ve seen any studies that loud bikes protect the rider on some way. But, in my town a biker dies at least once a week because drivers don’t pay enough attention. I would be scared to see how much worse it would be if they couldn’t hear them coming at all
@@jazz3799 So, that's at least 52 dead bikers per year in your town alone? That's almost as many as in all of Austria. Also, I don't think those drivers did hear the bikes.
@@jazz3799 Sound moves in waves. With the engine and exhaust making noise and the bike moving forward, almost all of the noise is behind the bike. So... you can hear where the bike was. This isn't helpful in the 'noise that saves me on the bike'-case. In built up area's the waves crash into buildings and reflect making it difficult to actually locate the source of the noise, so that's also not helpful. In fact, if someone would make the case of 'loud pipes save lives' I tell them to mount the exhaust pipe the other way so it aims forward. At least it makes more sense that way. Somehow they always disagree.. (I ride motorcycles myself)
I just want to take a moment and say that I so greatly appreciate you having subtitles on your videos. It means a lot that you take the time to put them in instead of using the terrible autogenerated ones
You literally just blew my mind how silent the cities in the Netherlands are. Also the beauty and how clean they were was so inviting. It is so charming to see a city I dreamed about for years. It was literally, no joke, my dream to move to some small silent nearly no cars Italian or something city and just enjoy the life, the things you see in old movies were old people just go about their day and young people search for romance. Sounds clinche, but it has some weird charm to me. And I felt this charm more so in this video then I ever did before. I wish this is what the whole world looked like. Absolutely beautiful and inviting. I am having tears in my eyes.
I have a feeling that the Netherlands will be a huge cultural, social and infrastructure powerhouse in the future :) Dutch designs are already spreading to Canada and UK. They are investing in the exportation of their knowledge and experience.
I cannot afford to live in Singapore but I spent a lot of time there and it is so wonderful to live peacefully without a car and enjoy a designed city…like Amsterdam…even Tokyo…is pleasant compared to any American City…we are hopeless barbarians and egocentric selfish…childish morons…..our Toys…show our lack of intelligence…only clever to make money.
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@@rayn3038 I hate when people like you go on tirades based on stereotypes.
When you think about it it makes complete sense. You want to talk as loud as possible to ensure being heard as well as possible, but you don't want to be bothered by your own volume. So you tend to talk at a level just below that of annoyance. Of course, other factors do matter a lot (for instance, we match other people's volume, and we also talk at varying volumes depending on our emotional state), but that's a pretty general factor that explains quite a bit
When visiting Venice back in 2018 one of the most surreal and enjoyable experiences was to simply walk in a city and not hear cars. It was so pleasant that it was almost dreamlike.
I'm from a quiet village in the netherlands and only after reading this I realised how venice was the only place in italy where I didn't actively notice how loud it was
Of course, walking in between hundreds of thousands of tourists to the point where Venice feels like Disneyland sort of lessened the enjoyable experience.
I'm a huge car enthusiast, and I love driving and racing. BUT, I think it's awful how car dependant citys are and how loud they can be. Sure something like an old V8 muscle car or V10 Supercar can sound "cool" to some people, but it instantly stops becoming "cool" once it disturbs people who don't care. People don't want to hear your fart can Honda, bro. People with one child drive huge 7,000 Pound SUVs, and people with a .25 mile commute think they need a giant pickup truck just to get to work and back. I wish I could walk or bike to where I need to go, but I don't even have a sidewalk outside where I live. If I could use public transport and bikes to get around, then I could have a fun car for driving on the race track instead of needing a boring everday car just to get around. I would even like an small electric car like a VW E-Golf or BMW i3 for driving at rallycross and track day events if it helped reduce noise pollution, though I can't get one as I have absolutely no place to charge it. You can like cars but agree that they don't have to be required for existence in a city, and shouldn't be comically loud.
Loud streets are also hell if you’re autistic and sensitive to loud noises (like I dealt with living on one of Berlin‘s busiest streets for 4 months... or literally anywhere in America)
All the buildings in Berlin seem to have awesome sound insulation. Close the (super thick and double-glazed) windows. Another factor about urban design that is WAY UNDERAPPRECIATED!! (You hear that NotJustBikes? Make a video about sound insulation in buildings! Also heat insulation)
As someone with painfully sensitive ears, it infuriates me that tire manufacturers lobbied against the requirement of a modification that would be NEGLIGIBLE towards their dividends. That on top of the fact that the noise of cities and roads is actually optional.
Tires are already designed to reduce noies. But quieter tires are more expensive. And almost nobody is ready to pay a higher price for quieter tires, when only a few cities on a whole planet would have a law about that lower noise. Best option is just to move that traffic out of the city in the first place, as well as slow it down within the city.
@@swisstraeng that's not the best option, that's a ridiculous naive UNLIKELY solution. The best solution is multiple small solutions that are feasible and realistic to implement that add up to combine a great change, like quieter tires. Expecting traffic to only drive cars outside the city limits negates the entire purpose of cars to commute to work grocery etc. This channel shows how there no public transport even in cities that allows reliable commuting without a car in cities.
I think a good policy approach to this would be for a country to make a subsidy / tax benefit proportional to tire quietness (it's financially equivalent to adding adding an extra tax to louder tires, if the base tax is already defined considering this anyway). That gives manufacturers and tire sellers the financial incentive to use quieter tires. This should affect only vehicles intended to be used in urban areas, so 18-wheelers for example wouldn't be affected.
@@Jwellsuhhuh Pedestrians are supposed to walk facing traffic in order to see oncoming cars. Most people who are walking on foot have in earbuds and listening to something anyway.
I'd rather calm my tinnitus with music or a podcast than blaring car horns. I couldn't stand to use the redline in Chicago because my stop was built in the middle of the highway and it hurt my ears to hear it.
Whenever I get home to Germany and out of the train station where I get picked up, I am struck by how quiet it is. I can hear things I can’t hear all year when I’m in NYC. God these videos just make me so mad we haven’t done any serious restructuring for bikes in NYC yet. A couple painted lanes on the roads that everyone ignores, when we could take Park Ave and turn it into a 100% bike zone.
this guy needs to make a video about Americans liking to use full-size trucks as they would normal cars. Just picture 6 ford f150s carrying 6 people to a Starbucks
It's mostly obese people/ Southern to Mid-westerners who drive those as their daily. Look at the West Coast or New England and it's a much different story.
@@patrickpaterson8785 I'd say it's more people who do some sort of manual labor or trade-like work. And of course the West Coast and New England aren't gonna have as many trucks. If you live in the city you have less uses for a truck. And if it's a Ford F150, those things have a higher pricetag than other pickups, so I understand why they use them as daily vehicles
@@ZackP504 I don't live in a city, and 90% of the trucks in the parking lot where i work (office setting) don't have a speck of dirt on them or even a tow hitch in place. I totally get the people who need a truck for work or what not, but for most people they just have it in their head it's a status symbol.
@@NotJustBikes you better never visit India Especially Bangalore Delhi Mumbai if American city is unbearable for you then I can't even imagine your reaction in these cities.
@@NotJustBikes I absolutely _hate_ motorcycles and after-market modded car exhausts. I would love every one of those vehicles to be confiscated, crushed down to a cube and returned to their owners.
My grandpa is blind and he hates electric cars because he cant hear them, but his solution was that he just thinks people should be able to walk places without worrying about being hit by a 2 ton mass of metal and plastic going at 30 mph. hes even an 80 year old american veteran whos reasonable enough to not defend fart cars
everyone else: tries to be quiet in the morning some dude with a 50cc scooter he got for 100€ on eBay: honey, hand me the loudest exhaust today, for I crave to embrace both this and the neighborhood next to us in the splendor of my engine's rhythmic ratteling.
@@dalegribble9101 I think this is a very American viewpoint. If you live in a city, you live in an apartment. Even if it's house/cottage it will be next to road. And not road to those houses, but actual road. So, it won't be one scooter... It will be a lot of them. Also, never heard anyone mowing lawn at 8am. They start at 9am earliest in London :) Also, not people most likely, but agency who take care of everything for apartments.
I used to ride a big bore honda express when I lived in the city, and I shit you not, some mother fucker took a Tao Tao scooter and put a modified 100cc dirt bike engine on it. Loud as hell, six speeds, went 90mph, and popped wheelies EVERYWHERE. That thing was rowdy as hell and I kinda wanna build one
@@PovilasPanavas man I used to live across the street that from a dude that would mow his lawn at FOUR IN THE MORNING EVERY DAY. my 40 year old shitbox was open hear and idled at 130db and my neighbors complained out my "whip" less than they did his mowing. I went to work at 3pm
One of the cutest and most depressing things I've ever heard was when I was on a first date with a girl in NYC. We we're overlooking the Hudson and the parkway was below out of sight, she then turns and says to me "I sometimes think of that sound as if I'm at the beach and hear the waves crashing on the shores". In the moment I thought that it was incredibly cute, but later riding the train home I realized just how dystopian that sentence actually was. Cars suck, and continue to cause problems weather gas or electric.
@@paulnadratowski3942 That's because the US sucks at regulating for bikes. Look at the video's Not Just Bikes has made about cycling in the Netherlands, where there are more bikes than people
But cars are necessary. It's so easy to say they are useless when you live in a big city. And as a big car enthusiast, I can tell you cars aren't just piece of steel made to bring you from point A to B
Yeah, I watched a guy livestreaming himself in Taiwan, delivering food on an electric moped and that thing is so quiet, it starts beeping at low speeds to warn pedestrians. Its really impressive how quiet electric vehicles can get
I've tried several electric mopeds and realised that they aren't fast enough. Their max speed should be minimum 60kmh, otherwise cars tend to pass you In 50kmh zones and that's too dangerous.
@@azbgames6827 That costs around 10k usd which is crazy. Average monthly salary in my country is 1500 eur. And the stealth bomber is not road legal (lights, turn signals etc) and it would be A1 category bike which needs drivers licence, yearly MOT and insurance. If it has plates, it´s not allowed on bicycle lanes and pedestrian roads. So makes it kind of pointless for commuting. I loaned a FIIDO electric bicycle and it does better than electric moped i had. Also much safer to drive since i´m not using car lanes, but bicycle lanes.
I live in such an UNBEARABLY noise polluted city that if I ever set foot in Delft and it's as silent as you describe, I'm gonna friggin kneel down and start crying from happiness
You're very welcome to move to NL one day! Please just dont take your car with you like many expats do. Beware that our housing is small and inferior to many other countries.
Same... our country is like 50 years behind Netherlands, or any western country really. Suks to be an Europe ex-communist country... Also, here we don't even have proper roads for cars, let alone bikes (potholes are all over the cities).
10:43 "A group of cyclers riding and talking is about 65 Dba which is about as loud as a normal conversation" [..] "65 is about the level that is becoming irritating" Thank you for letting me finally find out why conversations are irritating!
"The tire companies have lobbied for years against it because they're dicks!" lol l agree. His style is getting better as his ability to construct valid arguments increase.
You mentioned high volume sound triggering stress response, which I sort of recognized but was never fully aware of. Then you played the moped and farting motorcycle sounds and A) I knew they were coming because you announced them and B) I have control over the volume of my own headphones, and I could STILL feel my whole body tense up and my brain get super annoyed at both of them, it's actually incredible. I live in the Netherlands, I'm Dutch, lived here for my whole 27 year life, so I know that we do better than most countries, but holy heck the moped problem is REAL. Great video, thanks so much for the deep dive and highlighting the places where it's done well!
I'm fairly certain that loud exhausts directly tranfer all stress from the driver (asshole) to everyone in range which can be litteral miles in the country. (It may not be as loud but a motorcycle banging off the limiter is still obnoxious when its the loudest distant sound even if its probably 55dBA for you)
The sad thing is, they make electric mopeds and even motorcycles, but people want to hear that ugly noise for some reason. I looked up the Biro mini car and OMG I want one! :D
Another little fun fact that contributes to lower noise levels is that on many small streets they use cobblestones in the middle of the street. When a car drives over these cobbles it makes a lot of vibration noice inside the car, resulting in lower speed by the driver. But on the sides it is still asphalt, as that is most comfortable for the cyclist (so called 'fietsstraat')
When I stayed in Amsterdam a few years ago, the noisiest thing in the area was the bells at the Westerkerk. I'd trade car horns and revving engines for church bells any day.
To expand on why the d _has_ to be lower case: it's the SI prefix "deci", meaning one tenth. SI prefixes have a fixed case because sometimes the other case means something else. In this case, while not official, in some countries D is used for the SI prefix "deca", which means ten.
Well designing the tires only for in-city driving is kind of a waste tbh as they often travel between cities. So I can understand why you don't want to change the car for that.
@@captainchaos3667 Haha great answer. I see a lot of times people using m (milli) instead of M (as in Mega) to represent a million. For example, they write a 1 m€. Typically, you still know what they mean. Even worse is that Facebook uses that a message has been sent 5m ago. I always wonder how it was sent 5 meters ago? The greatest thing is even that sometimes one source uses 'm' for minutes and 'm' for months to keep it easy.
It's not about manufacturers lobbying. How would they lobby against the entire world, every country? Huh? I'm actually baffled just trying to guess how he thinks that works, lol. It's about the customer not wanting nor needing a tire that costs more, wears out faster, and has lower performance/safety. Probably ends up being worse for the environment too. There's a good reason for most things. But no, we like bikes and hate cars so let's just resort to name calling I guess. What an awful take.
@Saurav Choudhary Hi. I have the (arguably silly) hobby to recommend science-youtuber and education-channel to people - AT RANDOM! Yeah, i'm often called a robot of some sorts, but who cares? Its way to nice to have people say 'Yes thanks', regardless of how often they do so or dont.
I live in San Francisco and occasionally while I am walking outside I encounter the "farting motorcycle" which has been modified (or has a severe malfunction of some kind) to be as loud as it can possibly be. It's amazing that the sound can be deafening from ONE HUNDRED METERS AWAY. And then they often have a stereo blasting at maximum volume as well.
In the Seattle area the traffic was lower in March 2020, but went back to normal by May. Now there are just as many cars but everyone drives faster until you hit the girdlock that exists in specific areas every day.
I live in Indonesia and we have incredibly noisy congested roads - would you consider doing a video for developing cities? I think it could be very interesting to see what some cities in poorer parts of the world are doing to make their cities better. Love your stuff!
@@shaungordon9737 says the guy from a rich western city... in poor cities you don’t have the luxury of doing all these things. You need an excess of money to burn without remorse to do this
Too many Europeans were getting confused by him talking about growing up in London and showing pictures of London, Ontario (which decidedly does not look like real London despite being on the Thames).
Not to mention Fake Hallstadt in China. They rebuilt the austrian original without even asking. That's a rare case of real cultural "appropriation". Copying something because it looks exotic to you without understanding its real meaning.
On top of everything you've just said; I live in an area of Spain where noise is deeply rooted in the culture and I really struggle with it. Teens take the mufflers off their motorbikes, and then rev them every time they see a pretty lady, or generally want to show off (which is basically everywhere where there are people). Fireworks are let off every few minutes during festivities, and pre-covid, there was always something to celebrate. The fireworks are just starting to return now, and I'm totally not ready for it. The church bells compete for attendance for hours at a time on certain days of the week, and go off half-hourly at the minimum during the rest of the waking-hours (thankfully, they at least shut off at 22:00), and sometimes every 15 minutes. Restaurants tend to have hard tile floors, walls, and sometimes ceilings, which make them incredibly echoey and loud. And that's before you take into account people getting louder when they're drunk. Here, the vehicles are one of the smaller problems. But it would be an excellent step in the right direction to address them. This probably isn't the right place for me. But that isn't an option right now. So for now I cower in my home office with sound proofing and headphones while I work. And escape to the dirt roads of the countryside at the first opportunity, which is a shame, because there are many aspects to the culture that are absolutely lovely. Eg The camaraderie during the height of the covid times was at a level I had never experienced before.
As big as the car scene is here in the US, if ure revving ur muffler-deleted vehicle to impress anybody, girl or a crowd of fellow enthusiasts, everyone just laughs at u. We all think its stupid and such a call for attention. Thats one way the US car scene is better than Spain.
@@SavioureG I'm not completely sure what you are, and are not, replying to here. But I mostly agree with you. I live where I do at the moment because of my wife's career, and the fact that she likes contact with people. It's something we will have to solve sooner or later. But right now we haven't yet found a better option.
@@SavioureG Well said, and I totally agree. I would, however, like to make a couple of points: * The suburbs assumption doesn't work here. Short of getting a farm house on the side of a mountain with an hours drive to the nearest village, there's no escaping the noise. It's everywhere where there are people living. I grew up in the sort of area you're describing. That doesn't exist here. * My wife's career locks us were we are for now. She will have to re-train if we aren't able to find a solution. * Things are so extreme here that animal rights activists are calling for several of the activities to be banned. I found this out a few days ago. I'm sorry. I had no intention to imply that the area needs to change their culture, but I totally see how it came across that way. Some of the noises are part of the culture, some are solvable things that remain because people here don't travel and don't realise that it can be any different. At the moment, I don't have an option to move, so I have to make the best of it. And I'm struggling.
I hate noise but I somehow sometimes actually like the sound of scooters, because they remind me of visiting Italy and Spain together with my parents when I was a child. 😂 Perhaps some people just like noisy vehicles because they're just so used to them?
@@veroorzaakt6387 Yep, I genuinely don't know anybody in America who thinks that revving your engine is cool, aside from at specific shows and whatnot where like, loud and fast cars is the whole point lol
I resent living in the car dependent USA. There is no reason why I should have to drive my kids to their mile away preschool except that it's nothing but stroad the way there. I still bike it, sometimes, but when it gets really hot (and the ride back is in full sun), or the smoke from wild fires is bad, or just the fact that cars really make me wonder if I'm going to get my kids killed, I don't bike nearly enough. I used to live in various places in Japan and it didn't matter, rural or urban. I never needed a car. I really miss that.
I agree. I actually learned that the eastern US is more built to be less car dependent but it still sucks overall we can’t have quieter more efficient transportation outside of cities.
The conclusion is, when a Dutch city has a problem, they actually look at the source of the issue to resolve it, and when an American city has an issue, the usual response is something like “get gud noobs”
@@josabee6612 ah culture wars... why improve things when you can just make people feel it's other people's fault and they cannot do anything about it until "they" have been dealt with... then after spending egregious amounts of time/money/political capitol on said fake problem... they get voted out or get told it was fixed and they just never noticed it.
@@josabee6612 - Why are the streets so crowded with cars? *Guy with a heavy texan accent*: Well let me tell ya a thing or two ‘bout those damn mexicans
What always gets me is that people will jump on their phones to make noise complaints about a small concert one night, or neighbors having an occasional gathering but don’t often think about the din of traffic
Motorcycles really annoy me especially late at night when you're trying to relax in the evening or maybe even sleeping. Always get one of those farting ones making so much noise compared to literally everything else on the street.
The secret to make a city more quiet are trees. My apartment here in germany is next to a big road and a tram track. In the summer the trees in front of my window are canceling the noises realy good. In the winter when the trees do not have leaves the noises are much louder.
It does help, but I can assure you that I don't care much for the small part of my commute cycling on the cycling expressway by the ring here in Antwerp. It's some 10-15 m from the car expressway and full of trees and shrubs. You can't see the road except at some overpasses where it's even noisier. Of course if there were no greenery it'd be extremely significantly less pleasant there, don't get me wrong.
@@hesterclapp9717 There is a mod which adds smaller streets into the game which actually reduce the speed limits. Also, you can adjust the speed limits using TPMC.
They are! My house has a strip of trees in front and it's small, but decent at blocking out the occasional road noise. If you play cities skylines it works the same way, you can plant trees and grass in interchanges and around high-density commercial/industrial and it will stop your citizens from getting noise sickness (and increase the nearby land value).
This was perfectly demonstrated to me last year when Melbourne went into hard lockdown and had a 9pm curfew. I lived about 10 minutes from the CBD and for the first time literally ever, it was silent. It was unbelievably eery.
Oh for the halcyon days of the lockdown in April, 2020! Perfect spring weather, Vancouver was way quieter than normal, and the air was SO CLEAN! Even the mountains in Washington state, viewed along the length of the valley, were crisp and clear. The cars have got to go.
I moved to CT (south of Hartford) from northern NY, my car is now dirty after the rain, and i would like to close every fossil fuel plant in the area for this sin. And growing up on a back road i found comfort in sleeping with my windows open listening the frogs, bugs, and coyotes (coyotes are extra helpful if i foolishly watched a horror movie after dark as they are proof that nothing bad is outside).
I live in a fairly quiet suburb... or I used to. I miss how quiet it would be at night, with the loudest sounds in the house being either the refrigerator or the air conditioner. Then we had some awful people move into one of the houses on the other side of the road behind my house started having parties that lasted well past midnight, even during the week - before covid was ever a thing. With the beginning of lockdown, it was wonderfully silent at night, similar to the way it used to be before they moved in. Those silent nights only lasted one month. I'm pretty sure it was those same noisy neighbors who decided to get very, _very_ noisy motorbikes and started doing donuts at the crossroads (putting awful black marks all over the newly paved road) and racing up and down the street from around 10 to 4 in the morning. Not every night, but many nights, and occasionally they are so noisy and loud they get the cops called on them which means even *more* noise when people need to sleep because - due to most of the people who live here needing to commute - they need to leave the house before 6 in the morning. I wish we had speed bumps or anything else to make those jerks stop being such noisy nuisances.
When I was in New York City years ago right off Washington Square Park, we had to leave the windows open at night during the summer just to get some relief from the heat which also meant trying to sleep with all the noise that I'm just now realizing was probably 95% vehicle noise... And it's nonstop. This has got to be a factor in why New Yorkers who grew up in the city have a reputation for being so blunt, guarded, and impatient lol
I noticed myself getting stressed and anxious when doing the sound editing for this video, and my heart rate increased significantly. I had to take breaks every so often to chill out. Ugggh ... fuck everything about loud vehicles. They suck.
Does the Netherlands have teenagers who buy Honda civics and put extra-loud mufflers on them to make them sound like race cars? Or did you get to leave that particular brand of stupid back in Canada?
Thankfully the souped-up cars are not a thing here. There are much stricter laws around vehicle noise in the Netherlands (even if we do still allow farting motorcycles).
@@NotJustBikes I disagree. Although illegal, there are even people who have those 'exploding' mufflers. Rotterdam even wants to install traffic camera's to comdat noisy vehicles: nos.nl/artikel/2382573-rotterdam-wil-flitspalen-voor-lawaaimakers-ontwikkelen
As a Dutchie, when me and my brother visited NYC in 2019 we were so overwhelmed with everything, but mainly the sounds. We grew up next to a busy street, so we're pretty used to city and road noises, but this was on a whole other level
Honestly I’ve grown up in NYC all my life and I’ve started to believe it’s gotten even louder because you have people with cars that for some reasons have loud engines. I noticed this when I moved back home attending University in a relatively quiet part of Washington DC.
Same. I've grown up in a busy British city but my second day visiting NYC a few years back (I think 2017) I was so overwhelmed by the noise that I basically had a panic attack. It's very lucky that I happened to have that panic attack right next to the Red Cross headquarters, they were nice enough to let me sit in their massive empty quiet foyer while I calmed down, and one of their janitors was sweet enough to buy me a snack:) I've also since learned that I'm more sensitive to sensory input in general than most people. But still, New York is an assault to the senses.
The only place where Delft isn't quiet is the Mekelweg during morning rush hour. (Not during the pandemic) Thousands of students have to get to the TU so that creates a really big traffic jam. Oh did I forget to say those are all bikes?
The same scene probably also happens in the mornings in Qinghua / Tsinghua University, one of the top 2 in China. Actually Beijing streets would be full of bikes back in the 80s, but it has changed a lot now.
It's weird, other worldly, when you go to somewhere that's outside in the open, yet truly silent. I've only experienced it a handful of times in my life. Dead of night, no cars, no chatter, no AC or machinery hum. But also you don't realise how omnipresent that distant cars and buildings hum is even seemingly far away from the roads; when it's actually gone, it's bliss. However, it gets weird when there's also no wind, no nighttime insect or animal noises, nor water, just silence.
I remember some 20 years ago about an experiment with ground up tyres fixed together to reduce noise levels but since it hasn't become reality yet I suppose it had problems in winter or something.
I've never heard quiet asphalt, but some months ago I went on vacations to a small town with sand streets and we were all amazed at how silent cars suddenly felt when on sand. The rolling noise was almost gone. Obviously, I'm not saying we should have sand streets, but it did serve as a demonstration of how loud car tyres are.
My hometown has a few streets and it's really weird having such quiet traffic. I also think it at least used to be more prone to aquaplaning than regualar asphalt and is probably still more expensive
Not so sure on that. Yeah, the noise reduction is nice, but while I don't know it for sure I'm quite certain that that asphalt uses quite a chemical cocktail to archive its properties. If used it should be on a very limited basis as he recommends in the video. In streets that gain greatly from faster speed but are in quiet zones.
@@9SMTM6 one quick google search led me to an asphalt magazine. Instead of a conventional dense graded asphalt, a mixture is formulated with more pathways to let air escape more easily between tires and its surface. Quiet asphalt pavement options fall into four general categories. These are fine-graded surfaces, open-graded friction courses, rubberized asphalt and stone-matrix asphalt. Fine-graded surfaces are conventional asphalt mixes that are mostly composed of fine-grained particles; reducing the apparent road noise generated by the expelled air by altering its frequencies. Open-graded friction courses (OGFC) are a porous mix; with more connected voids through which air and water can escape. Rubberized asphalt contain crumbs of recycled tires that provide some flexing in the road surface as tires pass over it, allowing the air a bit more time to be forced out at lower pressure. Stone-matrix asphalt mainly uses coarse aggregate to create a stone skeleton, tied together by asphalt binders and fibers. Each of these options come with different wear, climate resistance and cost considerations. No one solution fits all roads. So the ground up tyres seem to actually be in use but not like that old experiment had them.
My favorite are the super loud fart motorcycles that also have radios on them. So the guy has an ear splitting exhaust and his radio is blaring classic rock at maximum volume.
That just sounds like a branding problem to me. We just need to call trams "hyperpods", stick some rbg lights on the sides and convince everyone that Elon Musk invented them. Of course any rudimentary amount of research would reveal that the idea is over a hundred years older than Musk himself, but when has that ever stopped the hype?
Thank you! Noise pollution is an important issue. Every time I research noise pollution, I feel like we are all living in a normalized horror story. I often sleep using ear defenders. It's uncomfortable, but better than the noise of cars. It would be amazing to live somewhere where ear defenders are less necessary.
"But [car] manufacturers have lobbied against this for years because they're dicks" got me good. I was absolutely expecting a detailed, thoughtful explanation of why manufacturers had been lobbying against low-noise tires, but I got an honest one instead.
I can give a more detailed explanation. Car and tyre manufacturers argued that low noise tyres may be less grippy and thus less safe. That's obviously bullshit. First of all, the sound dampening happens inside the tyre not in the surface compound. But more importantly tyre manufacturers are willing to sell noise dampening tyres - for a premium of course. When this was pointed out, the argument went to "well, with our tech we may not be able to meet all mandated noise limits" - because the obvious solution for a not perfectly solvable problem is to do nothing at all. In other words: They're dicks.
In some cases there are actually trade-offs between noise, energy consumption and grip. Mostly, however, no industry likes to be regulated so they inevitably resist regulations which does make them kind of dicks
I visited Tokyo in 2019 and what really shocked me was how quiet it was. No comparison to small towns of course but it was much quieter than my city. And Tokyo is an urban area with more than 38 million people in it.
So long as you're not next to a train station, Tokyo is remarkably quiet for the size of the city. Somehow they have been able to keep the farting mopeds/scooters out in contrast to many other major cities in Asia.
@@sanderw7153 While the train stations aren't really quiet I don't feel as bothered by them as I am by car or construction noise. It's by no means perfect but Tokyo has shown me that it's possible to have a metropolis that doesn't sound like hell.
And that's just tokyo, explore other cities in Japan as well. Been there before ! Sure it's not a megacity, but it's still pretty quiet ! Even the trains aren't all that loud as people think they are, it's there but the Japanese don't really like loud sounds as well, so there are plans to decrease noise pollution via trains such as with what they did with high speed rail lines in the city
I just moved to a quieter part of my city and it has had such a positive effect on my mental health. Not jumping multiple times every hour from cars honking and revving their engines is such a nice change. Hell, my cat has even gotten calmer and less anxious.
Last year, I've been on vacation in Amsterdam for two weeks and spent two days in Cologne before that. They're both cities of similar size in terms of population, but I found Cologne much more stressful than any place in Amsterdam and thanks to your video I can finally pinpoint why: Cologne was just fucking loud. In hindsight it's obvious...
Yeah he is generalizing a bit but that comes from a fact, that US cities contrast so much to Europe cities in terms of car centric design. While as a person living in Warsaw in Poland I hate some parts of this city I definitely love that it isn't that loud and walking or cycling is possible pretty much everywhere and is a better choice to just cycle to work then to use car or public transportation.
@@thetaomega7816 Or they can have cars drive slower speeds in built in areas and people learn to always look both ways when crossing roads. Unfortunately we have to admit most of us pedestrians are looking down at our smart phones. 1st world future problems.
WOW. Just WOW. I had no idea. I've noticed that I am more sensitive to city noise than in the past, but I didn't realize how possible it was to have a quiet cityscape. I can hear a freeway 24/7 unless I keep my windows closed. During lockdown it was the quietest here I'd ever heard...and it was wonderful! I wish everyone everywhere could just work from home from now on...and live close to work so they don't have to drive.
Motorcyclist here. The noise = safe argument is bull**** IMO. The only way to be safe on a motorcycle is to assume nobody sees you, and act accordingly. Hoping that a screaming exhaust pipe will alert people is misguided. The sad truth is that highway speed wind around our helmets has probably deafened most of us, it's much louder than anything else.
Yes indeed, this great video made me aware of the noise induced hearing loss aspect, do check it out, it's worth sharing widely ua-cam.com/video/ywTDiXMaUu8/v-deo.html
motorcyclist here, riding defensively/riding like you're invisible and a loud exhaust making you safer aren't mutually exclusive, when people say that a quiet bike = a more dangerous bike they're not saying "hurr durr i'm going to ride in a truck's blind spot and hope they can hear my loud exhaust", humans have several senses, hearing being one of them, a bike which is too quiet for other motorists to hear is more dangerous, am i saying that everyone needs to ride a harley to stay safe? of course not, louder doesn't automatically = safer, but there's a certain point that's reached when your vehicle becomes too quiet for other's on the road to hear your presence, we wear seatbelts in cars despite none of us planning on getting into a crash, because we want to be as safe as possible in the event of a crash, saying "you shouldn't have a loud bike to be heard because you should ride defensively" is like saying "you shouldn't wear a seatbelt because you shouldn't be crashing in the first place", having a loud bike protects you in the event when you might not be seen, things happen, you should ride defensively but there are going to be times when your exhaust saves your life in the event that another motorist inevitably doesn't see you, the exhaust is just another safety feature on top of everything else
@@emilycampbell6375 true, but there are a lot of people - the Harley crowd, the Duck crowd, etc - who use "loud pipes save lives" as cover for "look at me look at me look at me look at me".
@@emilycampbell6375 Do you think motorbikes should be allowed to make more noise than cars, because riders are more vulnerable? Because by that logic drivers of small or very old cars should be allowed loud mufflers too. Also allowing bicycles to have a 100 dB stereo or noise generator while at it. Your passive safety is your own responsibility. Putting yourself at risk by driving a motorbike or a Ford model T is your own choice. Others should not pay the price. Don't get me wrong, I like the sound of a throbbing Harley, but being noted starts with wearing a high vis jacket. Do you wear one, may I ask?
Almost all the same negative aspects in fact. They fix one thing: local exhaust emissions (OK, and help somewhat with noise pollution and general decarbonisation), but all the other problems of road danger, space inefficiency, car-storage, cost, congestion, resource consumption, ill health, particulate generation, noise-at-speed, and social disconnection remain.
@@xxwookey Crikey, who are you? I was about to say the same thing, almost word for word. I'll add the feedback loop of more cars making healthy/pleasant/efficient transportation more deadly/unpleasant/inconvenient and thus forcing more people into cars... I truly fear self-driving cars because anything that makes driving more convenient means more driving and more of all the consequences you name.
@@xxwookey They're in some aspects even worse than ICE cars, namely resource consumption and space required. They also help mask the demerits of cars by projecting a "clean" image
@@thewoode1050 Not sure that EVs take up more space than ICE cars? What did you have in mind? And the resource consumption thing isn't really true either. ICE vehicle plus all the fuel it burns is a much higher resource consumption then EV plus resource for its electricity. I guess you mean 'just the vehicle, excluding fuel' but that's actually pretty misleading. (ua-cam.com/video/1oVrIHcdxjA/v-deo.html is an amusing explanation of why)
I went to small village for my work. Back then i miss my home so much but now I'm really grateful for living here. It's so quiet i rarely experience insomnia like i used to in the city.
I used to live in a smaller city in the netherlands and it was remarkable how relaxed one feels, when you cant hear any noise around you on your evening commute. The only thing I heard was my own bicycle.
I generally agree with NJB, but this is a bit too pithy a take. Tyre design is a tradeoff between durability, efficiency, grip, and noise. All of these get better as the designs improve over time, but making tyres significantly quieter on short notice will come at the cost of more fine particulates, more CO2, or reduced safely, to some extent.
@@Slimmeyy That will have to be quite a nice happy meal then xD Development is expensive, and drivers buy tyres based on grip first and sound last, so hard to recoup the cost without government involvement.
As someone who is blind, I want quiet streets but I can’t have streets that are too quiet otherwise I can’t hear vehicles coming. Here in Australia we are trying to get the same legislation for electric cars and scooters because people with vision or hearing difficulties as well as the general public have had so many incidents. I love when I visit my Irish family, they live in the countryside and it’s just amazing to be able to not hear traffic constantly. When I come back to Sydney, for the first couple of weeks I can’t hear anything but the roads.
The biggest argument against road noise control: enacting a policy with concrete goals for the public good might encourage citizens to demand more policies with concrete goals for the public good.
@@guy-sl3kr yeah. They did believe it was for the public good. They weren't just soulless demons, intent on nothing but inflicting suffering and furthering their own power. They were regular people, infected with a vile ideology. But the average Nazi truly believed that he was doing the right thing. That's why we can't simply enact every policy that we think would be in the interest of the "greater good". We have to have more solid and specific reasons for any restrictions. We need data, grounded predictions, but most importantly of all, the consent of the People. Now, for the matter in question, we probably have all three in most places in America, so it's probably irrelevant. Still, it's important to actually understand how and how not to run a society.
@@userequaltoNull Dude I know that Nazis weren't cartoon villains. But acting "for the public good" hardly counts when you don't believe most of the public are people. Thinking otherwise means genuinely believing Nazi propaganda... literally taking them at their word. No one is arguing that we should blindly adopt every policy that can be justified with "public good" rhetoric. So what's your point here? That people can be dishonest about their true intentions? No shit.
My brother worked as expat in the US for a few years and noticed that everything is more noisy there. They don't have silent vacuum cleaners. And if you are in een hotel, beware that you are not close to a noisy ice maker in the hallway.
Many of our vacuum cleaners are actually functionally quiet, but they are designed to produce more noise (and in some case they just have a speaker that plays noise) because we are such dunces that if the vacuum is silent we don't believe it is working. We're ... challenged.
@@BTHobbies same for car doors, aparently we can make them as good as silent closing those doors, but we humans like the 'thonk' noice it makes when shutting it.
it probably doesn't help that most American building are build with MDF, sorry I mean wood, so even someone upstairs walking without shoe you can hear them.
I especially hate those drivers who would deliberately make their vehicles loud as hell. Like, okay, we get it, you just want to sound cool... But frankly, they're just making themselves inconsiderate and a nuisance to the city.
I live in the UK where vehicles that make more than 74 decibels of exhaust noise are already illegal, but no one cares, and the law never gets enforced. And I for one would vote for any political party (even a political party that I hate) that promises to crack down on them. That is how much I can't stand those things.
My last house was on a fairly busy street with a speed bump literally 20 feet from my bed. Also, there was a biker bar down the road. My mood increased DRASTICALLY when I moved to a different house. I HATE motorcycles in the city so much.
Porous asphalt is also known as Pervious concrete. In Dutch it is called ZOAB (ZOA in Flanders), Zeer Open Asfaltbeton. It us used on 90% of the motorways of the Netherlands, and is awesome when driving in heavy rain -- the water just permeates through the asphalt, making not only a quiet, but also a safer highway during rain. The two disadvantages are the top layer is easier damaged during winter, and that that it is less safe under certain conditions (right after installation, there is less surface friction leading to slightly longer breaking distances; and during low traffic in winter, the salt spread on the road may disappear through the tiny holes. Particular due to the higher cost it is rarely used outside highways, or in neighbouring countries Belgium and Germany.
It should also be noted that ZOAB is popular because it rains a lot more, and for much longer periods of time, than it freezes. So the cost of repair due to frost damage (may happen for only a week or two per year) is vastly outweighed by the cost of water damage and associated dangers.
@@jelatinosa Probably, but you have to take into account that ZOAB requires a lot of foundational work (I'm no technician so it might have to do with weight). In the Netherlands, we have to put down tons and tons of sand, and let it sit as the ground is incredibly wet (at least in the west) and sand sinks in for quite a bit before it settles. I can only imagine that the sandbed needed in a junglefloor would be a factor X higher than in the peat and clay of the Netherlands. Factor in the cost, and for a lot of countries the cost alone would be too high to feasibly but in ZOAB.
Lol. I live in a noise street in Brasil. I'm having problems sleeping because a Robin moved to the tree next to my apartament and sings from 1am from 8am all night. And I can't even blame the guy. During the day he can't be heard by other robins anyway. And like all City birds he sings a high pitch variation of his song all nigh long.
Its not the car, it's the driver. Guns don't kill people Even the loudest of all cars are quieter when they are driving in low rpm than in higher rpm's. Of course a lambo is stupid loud even when starting up, but it's worse if they bang throught the first gear to stop at the traffic light than if they were to drive it in comfort mode.
@@aarontoussaint8364 yeah, but it's considerably more quiet. I've done some observing today and all the cars which passed me made more tirenoise than motornoise in a ~30kmh road infront of a school
Oh man, I live in 14-million citizens Moscow and I so much agree with you. There is not a single place in the city without the constant background humming of the cars traffic. Some people living on the first-line houses near high-traffic roads have to use earplugs to sleep at night because of the crazy noise-level.
@@uis246 знаете, можно ещё прогуляться в центре. Например, в переулках возле Чистых прудов. О боже, как там спокойно и тихо. А всё почему? До крупных дорог далеко, и нет сквозного траффика. Только местные машины. Очень хорошее место...
@@ОльгаАйнанэ Это позиция "во дворах не так громко как на шоссе". Аналогия - "в Декабре не такой дубняк, как в Январе". Спасибо, КО. И да, видимо это оправдание лишения Битцевского Леса статуса ООПТ.
@@uis246 мне кажется, что логика - не ваша сильная сторона. Я вообще ничего не говорила про битцу. Наоборот подтверждала, что транспорт - это основной источник шума в городе. И без него город - тихое место. А вы на меня накинулись, будто я лично лишила битцу охраняемого статуса. Не надо так
Great content. I'm a motorcycle rider myself and absolutely hate loud exhausts. In my opinion European mopeds are made loud by regulations, pushing under powered 50cc engines. The thing that drives me nuts is the ridiculous amount of 2stroke stinkers that roam around European cities. Thailand regulated those polluting things away decades ago. That's made worse with CVT transmissions on scooters where you have no option but to rev the living 💩 out of them just to move. Stepping up to a modern 4 stroke 100cc or more and using good baffles in exhaust systems, dramatically makes them quieter. When given a transmission with actual gears allowing you to shift early, then you're able to tick along at city speeds.
The psychological affects of living near or having to walk along a busy, noisy road, with outsize lorries mere feet from where we walk can’t be overstated.
On walks with my big dog she cowers and gets close to me as massive freight trucks drive by. It makes me wonder what it does to me that I've just gotten used to.
In Poland in places that are above normal noise level they built noise blocking panels. And these are NOT those concrete reflectors but absorbers with special insulation which almost completely muffs loud car noise and even farting motorcycle.
@Łukasz Gliński --- I'd like to know the specifics of those noise barriers---what type of material they use; how that absorbs noise, rather than reflecting it; what they cost compared to concrete ones, etcetera.
@@LoveToday8 That wouldn't be right, they just make the car, people who buy them then drive them is what makes the noise. It should come out of taxes like it already does
My only experience with the Netherlands is visiting the Amsterdam airport and considering its size and number of people, even that was significantly quieter than other international airports like in Toronto. Kudos to the Dutch and I hope they inspire others to do better.
You just made me realize why I prefer riding my bike through the side streets rather than the main one despite better bike paths, it's all because of the car noise.
I’m gonna get me one of those decibel meters. I want to take it to restaurants where they have all the “cool” high ceilings, hard floors, solid surfaces, and all manner of deafening architecture that interior decorators install without thinking about how it affects noise.
@@sys-administrator Progressive only means drugs to you? We are the first to legalize same sex marriage which is a much more important one then your drugs that a lot of people don't even care about. We also rank number 5 in both the good country index and the free country index. We are top of the world together with New Zealand and the Nordic countries.
@@sys-administrator Okay? 3 negatives versus a hundred positives? Ofcourse no country is perfect and even the number ones have things missing that other countries have instead. And that wealth inequality thing aint even true. I'm looking it up but can't find proof about how we do worse then the US. Don't make stuff up...
@@sys-administrator You should check out this video. He explains about how that research appears to be wrong. I can't post a link somehow so you have to copy this very long title; ''REALLY!? The Dutch Economy is the Most Unequal? - a Response to Economics Explained''
I'm a Dutchie, but I live in a small town in a rural area where its so quiet you can hear your blood moving through the vessels in your ear, spoiled as I am I still think even Dutch cities are loud. I would probably be very miserable in any other city 😂
I used to live in Groningen, NL a couple of years. It is a bustling place, yet you can listen to conversations in a bar on the other side of the channel. noise pollution is truly something you only notice once it's gone.
Washington DC is a smaller city, but it enjoys many, many, many quieter neighborhoods just 2 or 3 blocks off larger traffic arteries. We need a consultancy and movement around CREATING new 15 minute neighborhoods with slowed traffic. We can draw candidates on maps and then target them for redesign and rezoning.
I remember staying in D.C. for a couple of days to interview for grad schools in the area and was absolutely FLOORED that I could walk out of my AirBnB to a breakfast café, smile at people sitting outside, and relax. Coming from Florida, it was mind blowing and almost made the decision for me lol
@@anthonythompson6053 I bet a patriotic themed "Do It Like DC!" or "Good Enough for Government!" would help many other cities. DC does things right with buildings and grounds. a) Building height restrictions gives us oodles of efficient 3 and 4 story buildings that don't need elevators but let heat rise. It's the right kind of "density." b) Outlawed heavy industry means less pollution. c) Great ratio of parks (and Rock Creek forest) to non-parks. d) Free "Circulator" busses between popular parts of the city. e) The Pentagon is our largest subway and bus terminal. And we have "bike lanes" right on our busiest downtown streets. f) Wide sidewalks with lots of Asian small restaurants and cafes. Beautiful train station and museums. 6) Several boat rental spots along the river. It's too expensive with Fed contractors and foreign diplomats. We need "DC Style" zoning and planning in some less expensive cities.
@@scottmcloughlin4371 Dutchy here who has visited DC about two years ago. It's just one big stroad, would not visit again. Who designs parks where stroads cross the entire park like every 400m. Bike lanes? What bike lanes? I didn't see anything that resembles a bike lane. The wide side walk where the restaurants are is not very useful because of the even wider stroad next to it. You are forced to sit inside due to all the noise. For US standards DC might look good but absolutely nobody needs DC style zoning and planning. The mid-size housing of 3/4 story buildings is good start though.
When I lived in a city I got used to the “hum” of the city. I now live in a semi rural town in the mid Atlantic area. The noise here is driving me crazy. My days are filled with mowers, weed hackers, leaf blowers etc. It goes on all day, when one yard is done, it’s time for the next. And if you’re lucky, you get to live next door to someone who must be trying out for a role in a refilming of Tool Time - metal grinding, hammering, electric drill, gas powered chainsaw etc. This noise is all the time. I have to keep a TV or radio on to drown it out, when I would rather just have quiet, maybe listen to the breeze and the birds (if there are any, can’t hear any). I hate lawns. BTW when I was a kid we lived a a house that was below and slightly away from a high train berm. I loved going to sleep when the really long commercial trains were running. It’s not just noise that bothers, it depends on what it is. And everyone is sensitive to different things.
I’d say the only good thing about my suburb is that there’s no grass lawns. Where I live grass isn’t reasonable for most people so we have rocks: no mowing! Just the occasional person doing yard work but it’s so much less frequent when the only things that need maintenance are trees, a couple shrubs and flowers and some quiet potted plants.
Curbing Traffic is a great book, and I can definitely recommend it:
www.modacitylife.com/curbing-traffic
Noise pollution is only one chapter of the book. The rest is filled with so many other reasons why we need fewer cars in our cities.
It would be nice if you put the imperial units on screen
@@jacob8565 You mean Nepers?
hey, regarding the loud pipes in motorcycles (the most controversial topic regarding noise and motorcycles imho), that myth is kinda debunked. I read an article a few weeks back that shows no correlation between "loud pipes" and saving lives. As a motorcyclist myself, I always argue about that when someone brings it up. If I find the link to it, I will edit this comment to add it. Love the videos, cheers.
Edit: could not find the link to the study itself, but found a yt video, that might be from the same people, not sure, but it shows the results of the tests:
ua-cam.com/video/v9QTPyMJGgo/v-deo.html
I grew up in the old south neighbourhood in London Ontario, not far from Commissioners road. I remember the students at my Elementary school who lived on commissioners road said that they couldn't sleep well at night during the early fall and spring because the street is so busy.
@@jacob8565 I think American dBa's have already been multiplied by 2.54
You might honestly be the greatest tourism ad for the Netherlands.
Tourism? I want to bloody live there, not just visit now!
Not so much tourism, but immigration.
However, with rising sea levels, the days of the Dutch will be over eventually.
@@GenericUrbanism Yes, does someone really believe that the Duch officials never thought about an eventual level sea rise?
This guy makes me want to live in the Netherlands, and I already live there
@@pocketdynamo5787 haha. The Netherlands has actually grown in size in the last 50 years.
I don't think anything drives the point home quite as well as showing a cozy looking town square with people strolling about and sitting outside cafés only to cut to how it used to look 20 years ago when it was a bloody fricking car park lmao
Especially when you consider that the amount of people seen in this single shot of a mostly empty square are propably still greater than the total amount of people who used to be able to park their cars there.
@@ligametis people will always talk twice as loud as the environment. One can see this happening in bars when there aren’t a lot of folks in. People tend to talk normal. Then more people come in. The battle begins. The more people or background noise (the bar may in turn also turn up the volume) the louder people will talk. At the end of the evening people are shouting to each other.
@@safe-keeper1042
Yeah, but now imagine the same restaurant with the same people AND car traffic.
What is worse?
@@RustOnWheels Which is why sound absorption panels are a great idea -- if the noise around them stays low, people don't need to talk loud to hear each other.
Here in Vienna, turning one of the main shopping streets (Mariahilfer Straße) into a car free street was a major fight which cost the green party, who pushed for it lots of voters. I remember people on Facebook going insane over that. I usually put a link to an old picture of car free shopping streets that were established earlier - eg. Graben with lots of cars in the 60s into those discussions. And a rhetorical question like "remember when we fought over this?". Because nowadays, *nobody* can remember how bad those streets were and how people thought that turning them car free would be impossible. And nobody wants them back full of cars. In 20 years, nobody will want cars back on Mariahilfer Straße either.
As someone who moved from Cairo, Egypt to a rural town in Minnesota, I can tell you that having low noise and clean air is worth so much more than people think.
Oh another Minnesotan pog
Hey welcome to town!
What a cool name
It's very cool that he talked of non western places
Seriously, I visited cairo and the egyptian museum while on vacation and I never had that much noise pollution and bad air. Glad it was only for a day. Buenos Aires was horrible aswell.
The most astounding thing to me, which made me genuinely tear up a bit, was when you walked out of the train station and instead of seeing a parking lot, it opens straight to a sidewalk of sorts. Never in my american life have I seen anything of the sort
haha outside of the mainstation of my hometown (basel), we have tons of trams and buses. as much as i know, our train station is only connected to the public transport, and not to the normal traffic
ua-cam.com/video/vxWjtpzCIfA/v-deo.html
Thats pretty normal in European cities tho, especially if the station is an old historic building.
@@NoGoodHandlesComingToMind But to be fair, NYC and DC are sort of the exceptions and his „American life“ is probably more representative of how most Americans live.
Any city with a decent subway system has this in the US.
The grass between the tramrails are awesome! They not only reduce sound from the trams, it obviously looks better than asphalt, but also reduces the temperature on a hot day and soaks up lots of water on rainy days and even reduces dust in the air. The biggest reason that most tramrails don't have grass is because they're also used by other traffic, most importantly emergency vehicles like ambulances, police and fire trucks.
When I see those grassy tram lines, I think of North American tourists I’ve seen happily and obliviously walking in dedicated bicycle lanes while cyclists curse at them in unintelligible ‘European’, and I picture those same tourists setting out a picnic blanket to enjoy the nice grassy park that no one else seems to have discovered :p
Turns out that ambulances and fire trucks work *fine* on the sort of manicured grass you see between the tram tracks.
@@Superdoxin Was about to comment the same. I have driven an ambulance on grass tracks and it's actually a *smoother* ride in most places since it's *not* used by heavy road vehicles, so it doesn't have potholes or wheel ruts.
Also they're hard and costly to maintain. Grass grows really fast in the summer, especially if there's rain
@@Superdoxin not every construction of grass tracks works as an extra emergency lane.
the most important criterion is if the rails are elevated or sunk into the plane. There is a German wikipedia article on the different constructions of grass tracks, if you can work with that.
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasengleis
"Car Horns should be just as loud on the inside of the car than the outside". YES. I've been saying this forever. Such a simple change that would remove *so* much needless honking.
Even better: the first honk in a period is half volume, and it increases every time. 😉
While we’re at it, can we also ban car alarms? I feel like they go off by accident so often that most people associate the noise with ‘clumsy car owner’ instead of ‘car theft in progress’
When I was a kid and a car alarm would go off nearby, my mother would yell, "HURRY UP AND STEAL IT ALREADY!"
They should be TWICE as loud inside for the Dutch who visit a friend and 'must' honk their horn when leaving, which the majority do.
AND, three times as loud when they do that when I am taking a nap. (I'm old, deal with it)
Not literally as loud. But as loud for the passengers as the people outside hear it. That would be good enough
I always thought I disliked Warsaw, until I got a pair of noise-reducing headphones and suddenly walking in the city was amazing, I actually thought to myself this city is nice. I think noise pollution is a major contributor to how much we do not enjoy our cities.
Warszawa? Personally I feel like there is decent amount of underground tunnels and "alternate roads" (smaller side roads or parks) you can walk through and avoid traffic/noise quite well. It's a city you need to know well to get to enjoy the best of. Poland is doing semi good work at diverting traffic away from city center. All kinds of cobblestone streets and 10km/h limits, (Warsaw is building new bridges and motorways 10km away from the city so less cars would need to pass through), building sound barriers etc. but obviously there is more work to do as always. I fucking love the city and I'm looking forward to the future.
But if you meant the Warsaw in USA, then my heart goes out for you.
Yes the city is absolutely infested with cars unfortunately and all the new infrastructure and buildings only serve cars and do not at all consider cyclists or pedestrians
@@Vjilmlllooiiiojol There’s a Warshav in the USA 🤦🏻♀️
@@matematicarka Yeah I know, I said so at the end.
@@Vjilmlllooiiiojol I know you know, I just can't believe they have so many names of cities from Europe. I can already hear an american tourist in Poland saying "oh you have too? Is it named after ours?"
I remember one of the best things about lockdown was going outside in the middle of the day, and it was silent. Not just quiet, nothing was going on, made for very very pleasant walks
I once stopped at the edge of a wind farm on a main road to hear the outrageously loud noise critics said they cause. But all I could hear was traffic noise from the road!
i once stood right next to a running wind turbine and i couldn't hear a thing
The buffoons were hearing car noises and mistook them for turbine noises
yeah turbines are quiet as shit because they kept growing in diameter and slowing rotation speed you could stand under one and you wouldn't gear much noise
@@catalintimofti1117 I've been under other ones, they were not totally silent, but the noise went down quickly as you moved away. I have read though that a few percent of wind turbines are really quite loud where they operate in turbulent air. But the vast majority operate in smooth air and are quite unobtrusive.
@@BooBaddyBig newer ones are much quieter than older smaller ones but location matters as well
"This man said that a cycle path would spoil the village-like atmosphere of Chiswick, but it was hard to hear him over the roar of traffic." - Jay Foreman
I love the Grill Brothers.
ua-cam.com/video/_DNNIB_PdaA/v-deo.html @ 2.47
"F*ck you Mrs Panhandle" I love his vids.
Map men map men
I am fairly certain rewatching all of Unfinished London a bunch brought NotJustBikes to my recommended page.
NJB if you're reading this you should 100% collab!
This series has really opened my eyes to how far behind the USA is. The sad part is that it really could be so much better, and there are plenty of places to model from. No place is perfect, but quality of life is everything.
Spread this video to wake up the masses and start a revolution against car centric sprawl.
I think the mindset in the US is, "If we didn't come up with the idea, it can't be a good one.".
Which would help explain the lack of SO many programs, services, and quality of Life improvements here. . .
@@slate613 unfortunately, I tend to agree with you. The US ego that everything here is soooo much better is really holding the limitless potential back.
The previous generation of boomers ripped up a solid public transportation system and left us with a polluted world in almost every way. We went backwards, and now we are just trying to get back to where it was, and then go up from there.
@@dandelion_fritters The Netherlands has given everyone a pretty good example of what can work IF other nations want to even try.
Infuriatingly, I cannot hear what the silence is like because of traffic literally 20ft away from me right now
My neighbor has an e-snorfiets, and the most noise it makes is the chirp when the console starts up. It's kind of a miracle.
That sounds nice. My neighbour has a farting snorfiets. It sucks.
Ours put glass pack mufflers (noise increasing) on his hot rod. I hate North America.
Ebikes here. My problem is my roommate.. He is.. LOUD! At the end of the street i can hear him, and my room is right next to his, the wall between us.. a thin funer plate. At the same time, he hates it, when im snoring, so... 1:1.
I want to like e-scooters. But the ideer of people just dropping them everywhere and drunk people using them. I think it will get better, but people need to get use to using them properly
@@GreenLarsen I like to point out that this is not an escooter issue... This is an asshole issue and esooters are not always a rent scooter...
As a car enthusiast who enjoys how loud cars can be there definitely is a time and place. As much as I love motor sports, most everything I need to do in my city can be done by bike and really wish more American cities were bike friendly.
The best argument I’ve seen is that fewer cars means more fun for motorists who can actually enjoy their drives
And the best thing is butterfly valves for the exhaust, loud when doing pulls, no drone and noise pollution whilst travelling
@@kalle5548 yes
Same. I love cars, but I also love to walk and to bike. My car loving probably stems from my earlier bike loving when a child 😭😭.
So that time and place is everywhere and when ever? Gotdamm noise makers piss me off.
I am a car enthusiast so yes, “me like car go vroom vroom” when I go to a racetrack or a car show. But in every day life, “me like quiet, shh shh”.
I used to hang with an auto enthusiast crowd. Its sad the entire subculture gets labelled by its loudest proponents.
Plenty of engineers and restorers will hopefully be vindicated when we become less reliant on everyone owning something almost no one understands.
@@zachweyrauch2988 I wish we had dedicated cycling roads in the United States like the Dutch do. I love cycling (because it is exercise but it is also like driving). I generally hate exercise because I don’t get an endorphin rush like many other people do. I just feel tired and sore. But I love cycling because it reminds me of driving which admittedly I love. I used to go on joyrides all the time when I got my license and first car. Cycling is like a joyride but trying to commute by bike where I live is dangerous. Especially at 4:30 AM (work starts at 6:00 for me).
@@thatcarguy1UZ Thats part of the problem with this video. People shouldnt be forced into desperation when they are willing to work harder for what they need instead of what we need for them.
For instance. When i was starting my career i was desperate for work (it was 2012) I took a job that seemed good based on the condition that i buy a car to commute. The job turned out to be an insurance scam and the place they sent me turned out to be a friend of the owner. (i didnt buy my car there) Either way i was now paying for a lemon i didnt need and had the ability to commute for years to awful temp jobs outside the suburban centre i lived in.
I would have biked somewhere for less pay and it could have meant the same net gain financially.
@@zachweyrauch2988 that’s yet another problem in this country. The infrastructure is unilaterally set up for automotive use only. It’s dangerous to cycle, and in many places public transportation is not available or is insufficient. There’s no reason why you should need a car to go about your day to day life. And I say this as an avid automotive enthusiast who loves to drive!
ME HAVE PEDAL! ME PUSH PEDAL DOWN! RAA
The one thing that shocked me most about Tokyo was just how quiet it would get in the city center. My family and I stayed at an AirBnB about 300 meters away from Shibuya Crossing, and we were amazed by how serenely quiet it was. You could never have guessed that the world's busiest intersection was just a short walk away.
Considering that a horn is a warning signal only to be used in emergency situations I'd say it's quite ok that they are very loud. But there definitely should be some sort of mechanism to punish unjustified use of a car horn. Mark Rober once had the suggestion to add a second more casual horn.
I think doing both would be best
Add casual horn *and* make both the same volume inside as out
my 2012 Volt has casual horn and regular horn
I definitely like the idea of having the horn be obnoxiously loud in the cabin too. Would stop people from using the horn as an ersatz sonic weapon.
Also it's quite easy to make the horn just as loud on the inside.
Put a window down.
They did in the 80s
German luxury cars had town and country horns
I was reading that here in Ontario the increasing popularity of cargo e- bikes is "problematic"..there is a discussion about regulating or banning them...What the hell?! These are the best car replacement.
I'm thinking of investing in one myself. I haven't owned a car in years and I hope it never happens again.
Only thing with those is they need to build secure e-bike parking. That way people can buy those instead of rent from Bird or whoever. Just only $1000 and parking would cost $100 per year probably, and doesn't require insurance. A dream vehicle.
We don't need to ban them, we need to improve the infrastructure they use.
@@swaggery why not require insurance?
@@aabb55777 Its illegal in Canada to sell ebikes that can go beyond a certain speed. I think that is a good law. THey should not be able to go faster than a reasonably fast peddle bike on a flat road. As far as I know the USA has no such speed limiters on their ebikes.
As someone with sensory dysfunction, cities are physically painful for me due to the noise. Delft sounds like paradise.
@@SongDog9 Eh, maybe it's both. I appreciate the sentiment, but I definitely don't process loud noises or bright lights in the same way that an average person would.
@@eldritchteletubby9319 the average person is desensitized to the noise/light pollution. Humans are normally really sensitive to those things, just like all animals. I had a motorcycle in the past, and back then the noise & oncoming car lights didnt bother me. Now after 2-3 years without a motorcycle & without going to the city, i'm suppeeeer sensitive to noise & bright lights, so much that the noise literally scares me!
@Blondie even i get close to a heart attack if you put me in the middle of a big city 😂 in nature there arent many things happening at the same time, so yes its normal to be overwhelmed by the noises/lights
I think it's like a super power. If you're in the woods, you'll be able to pick up all kinds of sound.
I love that you show the history as well. I never actually thought most of these countries ever had massive car usage issues. Seeing that massive parking lot turned into a walkable area proves it is insanely possible to fix these issues in the US. Looking at pictures and videos of other countries I have always wished we had those massive empty squares to walk and travel in instead of massive parking lots that are terrifying to walk through.
Parking lots are the least terrifying place in a city to walk. A narrow sidewalk is far worse, but thats not to say that cities should be filled with parking lots, I'm sure Manhattan would be much better off if they just banned all motor vehicles save deliveries to stores during certain times (maybe focus on weekdays while people should be working and not in the streets) and city vehicles (like buses and mass transit).
@@jasonreed7522 every time I enter a parking lot when walking the sidewalk ends, and then it's a free for all of asphalt with cars flying in every direction, not following the lanes, and cars backing out without looking
just remember: the difference between a nice open square and a parking lot is the amount of cars
@@jasonreed7522 then where does i-495 traffic go
We don't want your commie "fix". If You want the government to control the means of transportation you should move, bc Americans love our freedom
Note about the beginning of this video. For some (particularly neurodivergent individuals), you don't get "used to" the continuous sound; it actually gets worse. Those with sensory issues/disabilities (i.e., autism, auditory processing, ADHD) often are forced to wear ear protectors/mufflers just to function, and those aids become even more necessary in an urban environment. I personally know that I've had to put on some sort of noise blocker at volumes as low as 70 decibels, so living in a place like the city in Pakistan mentioned would be literal hell. It's not like people who live in the city always have a choice, either; commuting into the city for whatever reason may not be an option. Essentially, anyone, disabled or not, should not be forced to use aids in the place they live.
Having lived near a highly used street, Harley's were really by far the biggest nuissance. Not only their direct sound emissions are higher than anything (except for car horns), but also the induced low-frequency vibrations that are perceivable in the lower floors of nearby houses.
Big agree; sportbikes are rarely the loudest vehicles, and there's a lot more Harley-riding boomers than squids modding their R6
My dad owns a Harley Road King with bunch of aftermarket upgrades, including a high-performance exhaust. Before my parents divorced and he moved out, he would push it a couple hundred feet down the road so as to not wake up the whole house when he started it in the morning.
@@AWPtical800 Chad dad :)
I used to live in Hawaii which was blissfully peaceful. They opened a huge Harley dealership and rental store in downtown Kailua-Kona which quickly destroyed any quality peace and quiet at all hours of day and night and ruined the entire island for me. Moved.
@@jackrackham3406 Sport bikes usually have valved exhausts such that they are very loud when you open the throttle all the way, but quiet when maintaining a constant speed.
I am a motorcycle rider and I am sick and tired of telling other motorcycle riders that there are no studies that shows that loud exhaust saves lives. I hate loud motorcycles. Unfortunately I have not found a way to reduce noise but to move slower
I've read up on it a bit, and the OEM parts are usually the quietest. Electric motorcycles are getting a little better every couple years!
I can’t say I’ve seen any studies that loud bikes protect the rider on some way. But, in my town a biker dies at least once a week because drivers don’t pay enough attention. I would be scared to see how much worse it would be if they couldn’t hear them coming at all
Electric motorcycles do exist
@@jazz3799 So, that's at least 52 dead bikers per year in your town alone? That's almost as many as in all of Austria.
Also, I don't think those drivers did hear the bikes.
@@jazz3799 Sound moves in waves. With the engine and exhaust making noise and the bike moving forward, almost all of the noise is behind the bike. So... you can hear where the bike was. This isn't helpful in the 'noise that saves me on the bike'-case. In built up area's the waves crash into buildings and reflect making it difficult to actually locate the source of the noise, so that's also not helpful. In fact, if someone would make the case of 'loud pipes save lives' I tell them to mount the exhaust pipe the other way so it aims forward. At least it makes more sense that way. Somehow they always disagree.. (I ride motorcycles myself)
I just want to take a moment and say that I so greatly appreciate you having subtitles on your videos. It means a lot that you take the time to put them in instead of using the terrible autogenerated ones
You literally just blew my mind how silent the cities in the Netherlands are.
Also the beauty and how clean they were was so inviting. It is so charming to see a city I dreamed about for years.
It was literally, no joke, my dream to move to some small silent nearly no cars Italian or something city and just enjoy the life, the things you see in old movies were old people just go about their day and young people search for romance. Sounds clinche, but it has some weird charm to me.
And I felt this charm more so in this video then I ever did before.
I wish this is what the whole world looked like. Absolutely beautiful and inviting.
I am having tears in my eyes.
I have a feeling that the Netherlands will be a huge cultural, social and infrastructure powerhouse in the future :)
Dutch designs are already spreading to Canada and UK. They are investing in the exportation of their knowledge and experience.
Sounds like the Sehnsucht got to you :)
I cannot afford to live in Singapore but I spent a lot of time there and it is so wonderful to live peacefully without a car and enjoy a designed city…like Amsterdam…even Tokyo…is pleasant compared to any American City…we are hopeless barbarians and egocentric selfish…childish morons…..our Toys…show our lack of intelligence…only clever to make money.
@@rayn3038 I hate when people like you go on tirades based on stereotypes.
Italians love a moped, though
"The volume of a casual conversation is the level at which it starts getting annoying"
This video gets me.
When you think about it it makes complete sense.
You want to talk as loud as possible to ensure being heard as well as possible, but you don't want to be bothered by your own volume. So you tend to talk at a level just below that of annoyance.
Of course, other factors do matter a lot (for instance, we match other people's volume, and we also talk at varying volumes depending on our emotional state), but that's a pretty general factor that explains quite a bit
@@alexp6013 Depends of the location i guess. A casual conversation noise level in Spain can be pretty annoying.
When visiting Venice back in 2018 one of the most surreal and enjoyable experiences was to simply walk in a city and not hear cars. It was so pleasant that it was almost dreamlike.
I'm from a quiet village in the netherlands and only after reading this I realised how venice was the only place in italy where I didn't actively notice how loud it was
Of course, walking in between hundreds of thousands of tourists to the point where Venice feels like Disneyland sort of lessened the enjoyable experience.
@@korenn9381 idk when I went to Venice I saw next to nobody, like it was just a quiet town in northern Italy like the rest of them
@@honema123456789 was that in the middle of, say, a pandemic?
Without lockdowns in the tourist season it's insanely busy.
@@korenn9381 no ofcourse not, it was just not during tourist season
I'm a huge car enthusiast, and I love driving and racing. BUT, I think it's awful how car dependant citys are and how loud they can be. Sure something like an old V8 muscle car or V10 Supercar can sound "cool" to some people, but it instantly stops becoming "cool" once it disturbs people who don't care. People don't want to hear your fart can Honda, bro. People with one child drive huge 7,000 Pound SUVs, and people with a .25 mile commute think they need a giant pickup truck just to get to work and back. I wish I could walk or bike to where I need to go, but I don't even have a sidewalk outside where I live. If I could use public transport and bikes to get around, then I could have a fun car for driving on the race track instead of needing a boring everday car just to get around. I would even like an small electric car like a VW E-Golf or BMW i3 for driving at rallycross and track day events if it helped reduce noise pollution, though I can't get one as I have absolutely no place to charge it. You can like cars but agree that they don't have to be required for existence in a city, and shouldn't be comically loud.
"But it's not THAT loud" "you just get used to it!"
Sir, that's because you've already gone deaf.
"what?"
"What did you say?"
HEY, NO NEED TO YELL, JUST SPEAK UP.
@@joestein6603 I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER MY MILITARY GRADE TINNITUS!
Same for my neighbour, the DJ. "It wasn't even that loud, I turned the music down"
As someone who lives in Delft, the mopeds are horrendous since everything else is so quiet XD
Many newer ones are electric luckily.
One thing i will never miss, the smell and noise of those small two-stroke engines. The petrol ones should be outlawed asap.
@@matekochkoch I hate those, they sound like a chainsaw strapped to q megaphone.
Mopeds are so much in quantities in East Asia... I really hates that, including in my country..
You are so right... if you listen to the traffic in Berlin.... the loudest things are the mopeds....and they STINK ! : (
Loud streets are also hell if you’re autistic and sensitive to loud noises (like I dealt with living on one of Berlin‘s busiest streets for 4 months... or literally anywhere in America)
Absolutely true!
+++
I wear headphones even when I don't listen to music just to make any harsh noise, less painful.
yep that's me in a shitty carboard appartment near suburbia , hundreds of SUVs a day :(
All the buildings in Berlin seem to have awesome sound insulation. Close the (super thick and double-glazed) windows. Another factor about urban design that is WAY UNDERAPPRECIATED!! (You hear that NotJustBikes? Make a video about sound insulation in buildings! Also heat insulation)
As someone with painfully sensitive ears, it infuriates me that tire manufacturers lobbied against the requirement of a modification that would be NEGLIGIBLE towards their dividends. That on top of the fact that the noise of cities and roads is actually optional.
Tires are already designed to reduce noies. But quieter tires are more expensive. And almost nobody is ready to pay a higher price for quieter tires, when only a few cities on a whole planet would have a law about that lower noise.
Best option is just to move that traffic out of the city in the first place, as well as slow it down within the city.
@@swisstraeng that's not the best option, that's a ridiculous naive UNLIKELY solution. The best solution is multiple small solutions that are feasible and realistic to implement that add up to combine a great change, like quieter tires.
Expecting traffic to only drive cars outside the city limits negates the entire purpose of cars to commute to work grocery etc. This channel shows how there no public transport even in cities that allows reliable commuting without a car in cities.
I think a good policy approach to this would be for a country to make a subsidy / tax benefit proportional to tire quietness (it's financially equivalent to adding adding an extra tax to louder tires, if the base tax is already defined considering this anyway). That gives manufacturers and tire sellers the financial incentive to use quieter tires. This should affect only vehicles intended to be used in urban areas, so 18-wheelers for example wouldn't be affected.
@@leandrog2785 tax his tears
@@Jwellsuhhuh Pedestrians are supposed to walk facing traffic in order to see oncoming cars. Most people who are walking on foot have in earbuds and listening to something anyway.
"When you step out of the train in Delft, you're immediately struck by how quiet it is"
Blaring tinnitus: "its free real estate"
I'd rather calm my tinnitus with music or a podcast than blaring car horns. I couldn't stand to use the redline in Chicago because my stop was built in the middle of the highway and it hurt my ears to hear it.
@@jackveatch655 for sure, im just lamenting that i've lost the sound of silence
Whenever I get home to Germany and out of the train station where I get picked up, I am struck by how quiet it is. I can hear things I can’t hear all year when I’m in NYC. God these videos just make me so mad we haven’t done any serious restructuring for bikes in NYC yet. A couple painted lanes on the roads that everyone ignores, when we could take Park Ave and turn it into a 100% bike zone.
ironically tinnitus can (in some cases) occur from damage cause by exposure to loud noises
@@theblueclue3843 or by high stress and tension, as we just learned, can be caused by car noise 😅
this guy needs to make a video about Americans liking to use full-size trucks as they would normal cars. Just picture 6 ford f150s carrying 6 people to a Starbucks
It's more comfy.
It's mostly obese people/ Southern to Mid-westerners who drive those as their daily. Look at the West Coast or New England and it's a much different story.
@@patrickpaterson8785 I'd say it's more people who do some sort of manual labor or trade-like work. And of course the West Coast and New England aren't gonna have as many trucks. If you live in the city you have less uses for a truck.
And if it's a Ford F150, those things have a higher pricetag than other pickups, so I understand why they use them as daily vehicles
This shit happens in California.
@@ZackP504 I don't live in a city, and 90% of the trucks in the parking lot where i work (office setting) don't have a speck of dirt on them or even a tow hitch in place. I totally get the people who need a truck for work or what not, but for most people they just have it in their head it's a status symbol.
The video where Mr. Not Just Bikes doesn’t hold back and releases all his feelings.
Vehicle noise really pisses me off, so ... yeah.
@@NotJustBikes you better never visit India
Especially Bangalore Delhi Mumbai if American city is unbearable for you then I can't even imagine your reaction in these cities.
@@NotJustBikes I absolutely _hate_ motorcycles and after-market modded car exhausts. I would love every one of those vehicles to be confiscated, crushed down to a cube and returned to their owners.
@@andrew20146 same. The motorcyclists in my area are intentionally obnoxious and if I could get away with it I'd slash all their tyres....
@@NotJustBikes Cars*
My grandpa is blind and he hates electric cars because he cant hear them, but his solution was that he just thinks people should be able to walk places without worrying about being hit by a 2 ton mass of metal and plastic going at 30 mph. hes even an 80 year old american veteran whos reasonable enough to not defend fart cars
everyone else: tries to be quiet in the morning
some dude with a 50cc scooter he got for 100€ on eBay: honey, hand me the loudest exhaust today, for I crave to embrace both this and the neighborhood next to us in the splendor of my engine's rhythmic ratteling.
don't forget about the big bore kit and removing all restrictions =)
@@dalegribble9101 I think this is a very American viewpoint. If you live in a city, you live in an apartment. Even if it's house/cottage it will be next to road. And not road to those houses, but actual road. So, it won't be one scooter... It will be a lot of them.
Also, never heard anyone mowing lawn at 8am. They start at 9am earliest in London :) Also, not people most likely, but agency who take care of everything for apartments.
I used to ride a big bore honda express when I lived in the city, and I shit you not, some mother fucker took a Tao Tao scooter and put a modified 100cc dirt bike engine on it. Loud as hell, six speeds, went 90mph, and popped wheelies EVERYWHERE. That thing was rowdy as hell and I kinda wanna build one
@@PovilasPanavas man I used to live across the street that from a dude that would mow his lawn at FOUR IN THE MORNING EVERY DAY. my 40 year old shitbox was open hear and idled at 130db and my neighbors complained out my "whip" less than they did his mowing. I went to work at 3pm
This may be why karma usually ensures motorcyclists become doners.
One of the cutest and most depressing things I've ever heard was when I was on a first date with a girl in NYC. We we're overlooking the Hudson and the parkway was below out of sight, she then turns and says to me "I sometimes think of that sound as if I'm at the beach and hear the waves crashing on the shores". In the moment I thought that it was incredibly cute, but later riding the train home I realized just how dystopian that sentence actually was. Cars suck, and continue to cause problems weather gas or electric.
That's like a quote straight out of a dystopian cyberpunk novel.
@@paulnadratowski3942 That's because the US sucks at regulating for bikes. Look at the video's Not Just Bikes has made about cycling in the Netherlands, where there are more bikes than people
Cars are cancer.
@@Lotjeloveslaika Great reply. That guy sounds so American that he was probably born at a McDoanlds.
But cars are necessary. It's so easy to say they are useless when you live in a big city. And as a big car enthusiast, I can tell you cars aren't just piece of steel made to bring you from point A to B
Electric mopeds have come a really long way. They’re everywhere here in Oslo, and they’re SO quiet.
Yeah, I watched a guy livestreaming himself in Taiwan, delivering food on an electric moped and that thing is so quiet, it starts beeping at low speeds to warn pedestrians. Its really impressive how quiet electric vehicles can get
I've tried several electric mopeds and realised that they aren't fast enough. Their max speed should be minimum 60kmh, otherwise cars tend to pass you In 50kmh zones and that's too dangerous.
@@NSR747 the stealth bomber b52 e bike can go 80km/h
@@azbgames6827 That costs around 10k usd which is crazy. Average monthly salary in my country is 1500 eur. And the stealth bomber is not road legal (lights, turn signals etc) and it would be A1 category bike which needs drivers licence, yearly MOT and insurance. If it has plates, it´s not allowed on bicycle lanes and pedestrian roads. So makes it kind of pointless for commuting. I loaned a FIIDO electric bicycle and it does better than electric moped i had. Also much safer to drive since i´m not using car lanes, but bicycle lanes.
They really need to ban petrol powered ones, at least new sales
I live in such an UNBEARABLY noise polluted city that if I ever set foot in Delft and it's as silent as you describe, I'm gonna friggin kneel down and start crying from happiness
Watching this channel is both interesting and depressing because it constantly advertises a better way of life I'll never have.
You're very welcome to move to NL one day! Please just dont take your car with you like many expats do. Beware that our housing is small and inferior to many other countries.
Welcome to move to Brussels ;-)
Same... our country is like 50 years behind Netherlands, or any western country really. Suks to be an Europe ex-communist country... Also, here we don't even have proper roads for cars, let alone bikes (potholes are all over the cities).
as someone who lives in Brazil i want to cry haha
@@barkingdoggo3331 same
10:43 "A group of cyclers riding and talking is about 65 Dba which is about as loud as a normal conversation" [..] "65 is about the level that is becoming irritating" Thank you for letting me finally find out why conversations are irritating!
Shhhhh. You are thinking too loud.
it's spelled dB(A)
(decibel, A-weighted)
@@dutchman7623 It's not just screaming, it's frequency as well.
reduce humans, get less conversation noise
This guy is getting steadily sassier and sassier and I’m digging it
"The tire companies have lobbied for years against it because they're dicks!" lol l agree. His style is getting better as his ability to construct valid arguments increase.
Yesss!
These great videos, i want to show to my kids so they know what right looks like. But they feel violated when Dad shares a video that has language.
e
i too am sick and tired of people not catching on
You mentioned high volume sound triggering stress response, which I sort of recognized but was never fully aware of. Then you played the moped and farting motorcycle sounds and A) I knew they were coming because you announced them and B) I have control over the volume of my own headphones, and I could STILL feel my whole body tense up and my brain get super annoyed at both of them, it's actually incredible. I live in the Netherlands, I'm Dutch, lived here for my whole 27 year life, so I know that we do better than most countries, but holy heck the moped problem is REAL.
Great video, thanks so much for the deep dive and highlighting the places where it's done well!
I'm fairly certain that loud exhausts directly tranfer all stress from the driver (asshole) to everyone in range which can be litteral miles in the country. (It may not be as loud but a motorcycle banging off the limiter is still obnoxious when its the loudest distant sound even if its probably 55dBA for you)
its annoying but its not that bad you are just sensitive
@@kaz8103 maybe your standards are just too low.
@@kaz8103 noise is literally proven to be a major health issue so they are not too sensitive.
The sad thing is, they make electric mopeds and even motorcycles, but people want to hear that ugly noise for some reason.
I looked up the Biro mini car and OMG I want one! :D
Another little fun fact that contributes to lower noise levels is that on many small streets they use cobblestones in the middle of the street. When a car drives over these cobbles it makes a lot of vibration noice inside the car, resulting in lower speed by the driver. But on the sides it is still asphalt, as that is most comfortable for the cyclist (so called 'fietsstraat')
When I stayed in Amsterdam a few years ago, the noisiest thing in the area was the bells at the Westerkerk. I'd trade car horns and revving engines for church bells any day.
For me bells make things epic but if its in slow tempo
We may have a mosque now too that gives you the minaret every day, and thank God i live on the other side of Amsterdam
@@TheKeystoneChannel minaret is the spire adhan is the call for prayet
"if you don't know what DbA is, look it up"
"manufactures have lobied against this for years because they're dicks"
*subscribes*
To expand on why the d _has_ to be lower case: it's the SI prefix "deci", meaning one tenth. SI prefixes have a fixed case because sometimes the other case means something else. In this case, while not official, in some countries D is used for the SI prefix "deca", which means ten.
Well designing the tires only for in-city driving is kind of a waste tbh as they often travel between cities. So I can understand why you don't want to change the car for that.
@@captainchaos3667 Haha great answer. I see a lot of times people using m (milli) instead of M (as in Mega) to represent a million. For example, they write a 1 m€. Typically, you still know what they mean.
Even worse is that Facebook uses that a message has been sent 5m ago. I always wonder how it was sent 5 meters ago? The greatest thing is even that sometimes one source uses 'm' for minutes and 'm' for months to keep it easy.
It's not about manufacturers lobbying. How would they lobby against the entire world, every country? Huh? I'm actually baffled just trying to guess how he thinks that works, lol.
It's about the customer not wanting nor needing a tire that costs more, wears out faster, and has lower performance/safety. Probably ends up being worse for the environment too. There's a good reason for most things. But no, we like bikes and hate cars so let's just resort to name calling I guess. What an awful take.
@Saurav Choudhary Hi. I have the (arguably silly) hobby to recommend science-youtuber
and education-channel to people - AT RANDOM!
Yeah, i'm often called a robot of some sorts, but who cares? Its way to nice to have
people say 'Yes thanks', regardless of how often they do so or dont.
I live in San Francisco and occasionally while I am walking outside I encounter the "farting motorcycle" which has been modified (or has a severe malfunction of some kind) to be as loud as it can possibly be. It's amazing that the sound can be deafening from ONE HUNDRED METERS AWAY. And then they often have a stereo blasting at maximum volume as well.
Dude, Portland right after the pandemic hit was dead quiet. So nice to walk through
pretty much everywhere. The early days of lockdown is something to be nostalgic.
In the Seattle area the traffic was lower in March 2020, but went back to normal by May. Now there are just as many cars but everyone drives faster until you hit the girdlock that exists in specific areas every day.
Yep, same here in Amsterdam. It was so quiet everywhere with all the cars gone. Bliss.
Bingo! 'Portland' has Google AI put your comment to the top.
and Portland is one of the most beautiful American city's to begin with
I live in Indonesia and we have incredibly noisy congested roads - would you consider doing a video for developing cities? I think it could be very interesting to see what some cities in poorer parts of the world are doing to make their cities better.
Love your stuff!
This stuff is only for the richest of the richest cities to be honest
This is a great idea. I hope they’ll take your suggestion at some point.
"incredibly noisy congested road"
India: so.... Normal day road?
@@Re_Kitty No, that's a myth. These things could help the poorest cities as well. And it would save them money.
@@shaungordon9737 says the guy from a rich western city... in poor cities you don’t have the luxury of doing all these things. You need an excess of money to burn without remorse to do this
"Fake London" - gets me every time.
Too many Europeans were getting confused by him talking about growing up in London and showing pictures of London, Ontario (which decidedly does not look like real London despite being on the Thames).
Check it out the Fake Paris that exists here in Ontario! hahaha
I was born in the real London and grew up in the fake London and I can tell you that the fake London is definitely inferior to the real one.
Not to mention Fake Hallstadt in China. They rebuilt the austrian original without even asking. That's a rare case of real cultural "appropriation". Copying something because it looks exotic to you without understanding its real meaning.
I like to call it ‘the bad London’
After growing up in a forest, then living in a handful of cities, I can tell you that city noise is my arch enemy.
On top of everything you've just said; I live in an area of Spain where noise is deeply rooted in the culture and I really struggle with it. Teens take the mufflers off their motorbikes, and then rev them every time they see a pretty lady, or generally want to show off (which is basically everywhere where there are people). Fireworks are let off every few minutes during festivities, and pre-covid, there was always something to celebrate. The fireworks are just starting to return now, and I'm totally not ready for it. The church bells compete for attendance for hours at a time on certain days of the week, and go off half-hourly at the minimum during the rest of the waking-hours (thankfully, they at least shut off at 22:00), and sometimes every 15 minutes. Restaurants tend to have hard tile floors, walls, and sometimes ceilings, which make them incredibly echoey and loud. And that's before you take into account people getting louder when they're drunk.
Here, the vehicles are one of the smaller problems. But it would be an excellent step in the right direction to address them.
This probably isn't the right place for me. But that isn't an option right now. So for now I cower in my home office with sound proofing and headphones while I work. And escape to the dirt roads of the countryside at the first opportunity, which is a shame, because there are many aspects to the culture that are absolutely lovely. Eg The camaraderie during the height of the covid times was at a level I had never experienced before.
As big as the car scene is here in the US, if ure revving ur muffler-deleted vehicle to impress anybody, girl or a crowd of fellow enthusiasts, everyone just laughs at u. We all think its stupid and such a call for attention. Thats one way the US car scene is better than Spain.
@@SavioureG I'm not completely sure what you are, and are not, replying to here. But I mostly agree with you. I live where I do at the moment because of my wife's career, and the fact that she likes contact with people. It's something we will have to solve sooner or later. But right now we haven't yet found a better option.
@@SavioureG Well said, and I totally agree. I would, however, like to make a couple of points:
* The suburbs assumption doesn't work here. Short of getting a farm house on the side of a mountain with an hours drive to the nearest village, there's no escaping the noise. It's everywhere where there are people living. I grew up in the sort of area you're describing. That doesn't exist here.
* My wife's career locks us were we are for now. She will have to re-train if we aren't able to find a solution.
* Things are so extreme here that animal rights activists are calling for several of the activities to be banned. I found this out a few days ago.
I'm sorry. I had no intention to imply that the area needs to change their culture, but I totally see how it came across that way. Some of the noises are part of the culture, some are solvable things that remain because people here don't travel and don't realise that it can be any different. At the moment, I don't have an option to move, so I have to make the best of it. And I'm struggling.
I hate noise but I somehow sometimes actually like the sound of scooters, because they remind me of visiting Italy and Spain together with my parents when I was a child. 😂
Perhaps some people just like noisy vehicles because they're just so used to them?
@@veroorzaakt6387 Yep, I genuinely don't know anybody in America who thinks that revving your engine is cool, aside from at specific shows and whatnot where like, loud and fast cars is the whole point lol
I resent living in the car dependent USA. There is no reason why I should have to drive my kids to their mile away preschool except that it's nothing but stroad the way there. I still bike it, sometimes, but when it gets really hot (and the ride back is in full sun), or the smoke from wild fires is bad, or just the fact that cars really make me wonder if I'm going to get my kids killed, I don't bike nearly enough.
I used to live in various places in Japan and it didn't matter, rural or urban. I never needed a car. I really miss that.
I agree. I actually learned that the eastern US is more built to be less car dependent but it still sucks overall we can’t have quieter more efficient transportation outside of cities.
we would love to welcome you in europe 😊
@@mbdg6810 Most cities in the Eastern US predate cars. Doesn't stop the suburbs from being totally car-dependent though.
But do you wonder if you're going to get jumped?
@@joltjolt5060 People who raise that point also defend the second amendment with their life.
The conclusion is, when a Dutch city has a problem, they actually look at the source of the issue to resolve it, and when an American city has an issue, the usual response is something like “get gud noobs”
no, they blame the immigants
@@josabee6612 ah culture wars... why improve things when you can just make people feel it's other people's fault and they cannot do anything about it until "they" have been dealt with... then after spending egregious amounts of time/money/political capitol on said fake problem... they get voted out or get told it was fixed and they just never noticed it.
Ah yes ofcourse, that's why multiple 30+ year old "problems" haven't been solved to this day.
@@josabee6612 - Why are the streets so crowded with cars?
*Guy with a heavy texan accent*: Well let me tell ya a thing or two ‘bout those damn mexicans
@@LucasSantos-ss6ou I’m honestly sick of it. Living in North America is like living amongst a culture of griefers.
What always gets me is that people will jump on their phones to make noise complaints about a small concert one night, or neighbors having an occasional gathering but don’t often think about the din of traffic
Motorcycles really annoy me especially late at night when you're trying to relax in the evening or maybe even sleeping. Always get one of those farting ones making so much noise compared to literally everything else on the street.
@@maknyc1539 the video debunks this claim during the 12:00 chapter about motorcycles
The secret to make a city more quiet are trees. My apartment here in germany is next to a big road and a tram track. In the summer the trees in front of my window are canceling the noises realy good. In the winter when the trees do not have leaves the noises are much louder.
Trees make the street cooler in summer and more enjoyable to walk through, too!
As a cities skylines player who can't stop everyone speeding down the bus lane, this is the next best way to do it
It does help, but I can assure you that I don't care much for the small part of my commute cycling on the cycling expressway by the ring here in Antwerp. It's some 10-15 m from the car expressway and full of trees and shrubs. You can't see the road except at some overpasses where it's even noisier.
Of course if there were no greenery it'd be extremely significantly less pleasant there, don't get me wrong.
@@hesterclapp9717 There is a mod which adds smaller streets into the game which actually reduce the speed limits. Also, you can adjust the speed limits using TPMC.
They are! My house has a strip of trees in front and it's small, but decent at blocking out the occasional road noise. If you play cities skylines it works the same way, you can plant trees and grass in interchanges and around high-density commercial/industrial and it will stop your citizens from getting noise sickness (and increase the nearby land value).
This was perfectly demonstrated to me last year when Melbourne went into hard lockdown and had a 9pm curfew. I lived about 10 minutes from the CBD and for the first time literally ever, it was silent. It was unbelievably eery.
Oh for the halcyon days of the lockdown in April, 2020! Perfect spring weather, Vancouver was way quieter than normal, and the air was SO CLEAN! Even the mountains in Washington state, viewed along the length of the valley, were crisp and clear. The cars have got to go.
I moved to CT (south of Hartford) from northern NY, my car is now dirty after the rain, and i would like to close every fossil fuel plant in the area for this sin.
And growing up on a back road i found comfort in sleeping with my windows open listening the frogs, bugs, and coyotes (coyotes are extra helpful if i foolishly watched a horror movie after dark as they are proof that nothing bad is outside).
I live in a fairly quiet suburb... or I used to. I miss how quiet it would be at night, with the loudest sounds in the house being either the refrigerator or the air conditioner.
Then we had some awful people move into one of the houses on the other side of the road behind my house started having parties that lasted well past midnight, even during the week - before covid was ever a thing. With the beginning of lockdown, it was wonderfully silent at night, similar to the way it used to be before they moved in.
Those silent nights only lasted one month.
I'm pretty sure it was those same noisy neighbors who decided to get very, _very_ noisy motorbikes and started doing donuts at the crossroads (putting awful black marks all over the newly paved road) and racing up and down the street from around 10 to 4 in the morning. Not every night, but many nights, and occasionally they are so noisy and loud they get the cops called on them which means even *more* noise when people need to sleep because - due to most of the people who live here needing to commute - they need to leave the house before 6 in the morning.
I wish we had speed bumps or anything else to make those jerks stop being such noisy nuisances.
@@NotAFanOfHandles increase penalties for misuse of vehicle
@@robertcartwright4374 how can people get through to points far west and east
When I was in New York City years ago right off Washington Square Park, we had to leave the windows open at night during the summer just to get some relief from the heat which also meant trying to sleep with all the noise that I'm just now realizing was probably 95% vehicle noise... And it's nonstop. This has got to be a factor in why New Yorkers who grew up in the city have a reputation for being so blunt, guarded, and impatient lol
I noticed myself getting stressed and anxious when doing the sound editing for this video, and my heart rate increased significantly. I had to take breaks every so often to chill out.
Ugggh ... fuck everything about loud vehicles. They suck.
+1. I did a recording once at 12 lanes road in Moscow and almost jumped off chair when I played the video at home in headphones.
Does the Netherlands have teenagers who buy Honda civics and put extra-loud mufflers on them to make them sound like race cars? Or did you get to leave that particular brand of stupid back in Canada?
Thankfully the souped-up cars are not a thing here. There are much stricter laws around vehicle noise in the Netherlands (even if we do still allow farting motorcycles).
@@NotJustBikes I disagree. Although illegal, there are even people who have those 'exploding' mufflers. Rotterdam even wants to install traffic camera's to comdat noisy vehicles: nos.nl/artikel/2382573-rotterdam-wil-flitspalen-voor-lawaaimakers-ontwikkelen
Wow njb swearing
As a Dutchie, when me and my brother visited NYC in 2019 we were so overwhelmed with everything, but mainly the sounds. We grew up next to a busy street, so we're pretty used to city and road noises, but this was on a whole other level
Honestly I’ve grown up in NYC all my life and I’ve started to believe it’s gotten even louder because you have people with cars that for some reasons have loud engines. I noticed this when I moved back home attending University in a relatively quiet part of Washington DC.
I can’t sleep without the city noises now lol
Being in NYC is an assault on the senses. Being desensitised to that isn't healthy. It's a numbing of the senses, in some sense...
Same. I've grown up in a busy British city but my second day visiting NYC a few years back (I think 2017) I was so overwhelmed by the noise that I basically had a panic attack. It's very lucky that I happened to have that panic attack right next to the Red Cross headquarters, they were nice enough to let me sit in their massive empty quiet foyer while I calmed down, and one of their janitors was sweet enough to buy me a snack:) I've also since learned that I'm more sensitive to sensory input in general than most people. But still, New York is an assault to the senses.
@@user-ed7et3pb4o I hear you :) Thank goodness fke the sweet Red Cross people
The only place where Delft isn't quiet is the Mekelweg during morning rush hour. (Not during the pandemic) Thousands of students have to get to the TU so that creates a really big traffic jam.
Oh did I forget to say those are all bikes?
Imagine how big the traffic jam was if they where all in cars that take up about the square surface of 12 people on a bike..
@@TheTryingDutchman i dare not think about it
The same scene probably also happens in the mornings in Qinghua / Tsinghua University, one of the top 2 in China. Actually Beijing streets would be full of bikes back in the 80s, but it has changed a lot now.
It's weird, other worldly, when you go to somewhere that's outside in the open, yet truly silent. I've only experienced it a handful of times in my life. Dead of night, no cars, no chatter, no AC or machinery hum. But also you don't realise how omnipresent that distant cars and buildings hum is even seemingly far away from the roads; when it's actually gone, it's bliss. However, it gets weird when there's also no wind, no nighttime insect or animal noises, nor water, just silence.
Never heard of quiet asphalt before, that's pretty neat! Wish it was used more.
I remember some 20 years ago about an experiment with ground up tyres fixed together to reduce noise levels but since it hasn't become reality yet I suppose it had problems in winter or something.
I've never heard quiet asphalt, but some months ago I went on vacations to a small town with sand streets and we were all amazed at how silent cars suddenly felt when on sand. The rolling noise was almost gone. Obviously, I'm not saying we should have sand streets, but it did serve as a demonstration of how loud car tyres are.
My hometown has a few streets and it's really weird having such quiet traffic. I also think it at least used to be more prone to aquaplaning than regualar asphalt and is probably still more expensive
Not so sure on that. Yeah, the noise reduction is nice, but while I don't know it for sure I'm quite certain that that asphalt uses quite a chemical cocktail to archive its properties.
If used it should be on a very limited basis as he recommends in the video. In streets that gain greatly from faster speed but are in quiet zones.
@@9SMTM6 one quick google search led me to an asphalt magazine.
Instead of a conventional dense graded asphalt, a mixture is formulated with more pathways to let air escape more easily between tires and its surface.
Quiet asphalt pavement options fall into four general categories. These are fine-graded surfaces, open-graded friction courses, rubberized asphalt and stone-matrix asphalt.
Fine-graded surfaces are conventional asphalt mixes that are mostly composed of fine-grained particles; reducing the apparent road noise generated by the expelled air by altering its frequencies. Open-graded friction courses (OGFC) are a porous mix; with more connected voids through which air and water can escape. Rubberized asphalt contain crumbs of recycled tires that provide some flexing in the road surface as tires pass over it, allowing the air a bit more time to be forced out at lower pressure. Stone-matrix asphalt mainly uses coarse aggregate to create a stone skeleton, tied together by asphalt binders and fibers.
Each of these options come with different wear, climate resistance and cost considerations. No one solution fits all roads.
So the ground up tyres seem to actually be in use but not like that old experiment had them.
My favorite are the super loud fart motorcycles that also have radios on them. So the guy has an ear splitting exhaust and his radio is blaring classic rock at maximum volume.
Ah. A tram line and a bicycle path can carry as much people as 8 lane stroad or 3 times of the Vegas loops. This is just too funny
it could be so simple, but car must go vroom and public transport/biking is for poor people or something
Doesn't have rgb tho 0/10
Well yeah. A tram carries a LOT of people.
It truly is insane
That just sounds like a branding problem to me. We just need to call trams "hyperpods", stick some rbg lights on the sides and convince everyone that Elon Musk invented them. Of course any rudimentary amount of research would reveal that the idea is over a hundred years older than Musk himself, but when has that ever stopped the hype?
Thank you! Noise pollution is an important issue. Every time I research noise pollution, I feel like we are all living in a normalized horror story.
I often sleep using ear defenders. It's uncomfortable, but better than the noise of cars. It would be amazing to live somewhere where ear defenders are less necessary.
If u haven't already, check out silicone ear plugs! They're are good insulators and way comfier
"But [car] manufacturers have lobbied against this for years because they're dicks" got me good. I was absolutely expecting a detailed, thoughtful explanation of why manufacturers had been lobbying against low-noise tires, but I got an honest one instead.
Das Kapital, the dicks get all the capital.
I can give a more detailed explanation.
Car and tyre manufacturers argued that low noise tyres may be less grippy and thus less safe. That's obviously bullshit. First of all, the sound dampening happens inside the tyre not in the surface compound. But more importantly tyre manufacturers are willing to sell noise dampening tyres - for a premium of course.
When this was pointed out, the argument went to "well, with our tech we may not be able to meet all mandated noise limits" - because the obvious solution for a not perfectly solvable problem is to do nothing at all.
In other words: They're dicks.
@@swapode That makes sense.
When corporations are $$lobbying$$ it is usually about one thing. - To protect their bottom line.
@@aabb55777 A large portion of the noise has to travel through the inside of the tyre first where it could be caught with relative ease.
In some cases there are actually trade-offs between noise, energy consumption and grip. Mostly, however, no industry likes to be regulated so they inevitably resist regulations which does make them kind of dicks
I visited Tokyo in 2019 and what really shocked me was how quiet it was. No comparison to small towns of course but it was much quieter than my city. And Tokyo is an urban area with more than 38 million people in it.
So long as you're not next to a train station, Tokyo is remarkably quiet for the size of the city. Somehow they have been able to keep the farting mopeds/scooters out in contrast to many other major cities in Asia.
@@sanderw7153 While the train stations aren't really quiet I don't feel as bothered by them as I am by car or construction noise.
It's by no means perfect but Tokyo has shown me that it's possible to have a metropolis that doesn't sound like hell.
And that's just tokyo, explore other cities in Japan as well. Been there before ! Sure it's not a megacity, but it's still pretty quiet ! Even the trains aren't all that loud as people think they are, it's there but the Japanese don't really like loud sounds as well, so there are plans to decrease noise pollution via trains such as with what they did with high speed rail lines in the city
@@lars7935 Yes!
@@zycklacon9588 I loved the quiet of the Hakone mountains at night. I hope to go again when the situation allows it.
I just moved to a quieter part of my city and it has had such a positive effect on my mental health. Not jumping multiple times every hour from cars honking and revving their engines is such a nice change. Hell, my cat has even gotten calmer and less anxious.
Poor cats. It's probably way worse for them.
Genuienly, what the fUCK are people doing revving their engines right next to a residential
Thats why I don't want to move to the city
@@sirpuffball6366 I'd bet those very same people would been angry if you demuff your car. freedumb for them but not for you.
Meh I can't sleep without the sound of blow off valves
Last year, I've been on vacation in Amsterdam for two weeks and spent two days in Cologne before that. They're both cities of similar size in terms of population, but I found Cologne much more stressful than any place in Amsterdam and thanks to your video I can finally pinpoint why: Cologne was just fucking loud. In hindsight it's obvious...
Yeah he is generalizing a bit but that comes from a fact, that US cities contrast so much to Europe cities in terms of car centric design. While as a person living in Warsaw in Poland I hate some parts of this city I definitely love that it isn't that loud and walking or cycling is possible pretty much everywhere and is a better choice to just cycle to work then to use car or public transportation.
People ride past my apartment and PURPOSELY rev their engines to be cool 😒 we need a significant cultural change
What are they going to do when electric cars become standard?
Roll down their windows and blast their music to get attention?
@@AdmiralBison not but an electric car.
@@AdmiralBison they will probably install noise making contraptions on their cars so that they can be just as obnoxious reving their electric cars.
@@jelatinosa in most countries this is actually a law that you are able to hear electric cars. Its aweful
@@thetaomega7816 Or they can have cars drive slower speeds in built in areas and people learn to always look both ways when crossing roads.
Unfortunately we have to admit most of us pedestrians are looking down at our smart phones.
1st world future problems.
WOW. Just WOW. I had no idea. I've noticed that I am more sensitive to city noise than in the past, but I didn't realize how possible it was to have a quiet cityscape. I can hear a freeway 24/7 unless I keep my windows closed. During lockdown it was the quietest here I'd ever heard...and it was wonderful! I wish everyone everywhere could just work from home from now on...and live close to work so they don't have to drive.
Motorcyclist here. The noise = safe argument is bull**** IMO. The only way to be safe on a motorcycle is to assume nobody sees you, and act accordingly. Hoping that a screaming exhaust pipe will alert people is misguided. The sad truth is that highway speed wind around our helmets has probably deafened most of us, it's much louder than anything else.
Yes indeed, this great video made me aware of the noise induced hearing loss aspect, do check it out, it's worth sharing widely ua-cam.com/video/ywTDiXMaUu8/v-deo.html
motorcyclist here, riding defensively/riding like you're invisible and a loud exhaust making you safer aren't mutually exclusive, when people say that a quiet bike = a more dangerous bike they're not saying "hurr durr i'm going to ride in a truck's blind spot and hope they can hear my loud exhaust", humans have several senses, hearing being one of them, a bike which is too quiet for other motorists to hear is more dangerous, am i saying that everyone needs to ride a harley to stay safe? of course not, louder doesn't automatically = safer, but there's a certain point that's reached when your vehicle becomes too quiet for other's on the road to hear your presence, we wear seatbelts in cars despite none of us planning on getting into a crash, because we want to be as safe as possible in the event of a crash, saying "you shouldn't have a loud bike to be heard because you should ride defensively" is like saying "you shouldn't wear a seatbelt because you shouldn't be crashing in the first place", having a loud bike protects you in the event when you might not be seen, things happen, you should ride defensively but there are going to be times when your exhaust saves your life in the event that another motorist inevitably doesn't see you, the exhaust is just another safety feature on top of everything else
@@emilycampbell6375 true, but there are a lot of people - the Harley crowd, the Duck crowd, etc - who use "loud pipes save lives" as cover for "look at me look at me look at me look at me".
@@emilycampbell6375 Do you think motorbikes should be allowed to make more noise than cars, because riders are more vulnerable?
Because by that logic drivers of small or very old cars should be allowed loud mufflers too. Also allowing bicycles to have a 100 dB stereo or noise generator while at it.
Your passive safety is your own responsibility. Putting yourself at risk by driving a motorbike or a Ford model T is your own choice. Others should not pay the price.
Don't get me wrong, I like the sound of a throbbing Harley, but being noted starts with wearing a high vis jacket. Do you wear one, may I ask?
@@STARDRIVE you clearly didn't read my comment fully so i don't see the point in responding to yours
I have lived in Delft for 18 years but I never payed attention to the noise, but now that I think about it, it's indeed very silent
I like he also called out the tesla's people do act like its a holy car while it has many of the same negative facts as normal cars
Almost all the same negative aspects in fact. They fix one thing: local exhaust emissions (OK, and help somewhat with noise pollution and general decarbonisation), but all the other problems of road danger, space inefficiency, car-storage, cost, congestion, resource consumption, ill health, particulate generation, noise-at-speed, and social disconnection remain.
@@xxwookey Crikey, who are you? I was about to say the same thing, almost word for word. I'll add the feedback loop of more cars making healthy/pleasant/efficient transportation more deadly/unpleasant/inconvenient and thus forcing more people into cars... I truly fear self-driving cars because anything that makes driving more convenient means more driving and more of all the consequences you name.
At speed thay dont make les noise than normal cars
@@xxwookey They're in some aspects even worse than ICE cars, namely resource consumption and space required. They also help mask the demerits of cars by projecting a "clean" image
@@thewoode1050 Not sure that EVs take up more space than ICE cars? What did you have in mind? And the resource consumption thing isn't really true either. ICE vehicle plus all the fuel it burns is a much higher resource consumption then EV plus resource for its electricity. I guess you mean 'just the vehicle, excluding fuel' but that's actually pretty misleading. (ua-cam.com/video/1oVrIHcdxjA/v-deo.html is an amusing explanation of why)
As a noise sensitive person, that quiet city sounds like heaven.
I went to small village for my work. Back then i miss my home so much but now I'm really grateful for living here. It's so quiet i rarely experience insomnia like i used to in the city.
Snap
“as a noise sensitive person”
oh, so you mean a person?
@@RwandaBob No, as with most such things there's a spectrum.
I used to live in a smaller city in the netherlands and it was remarkable how relaxed one feels, when you cant hear any noise around you on your evening commute. The only thing I heard was my own bicycle.
"Manufacturers have lobbied against this because they're dicks"
- Not Just Bikes 2021
Das kapital, Karl Marx
@@purpurina5663 cant stop them because it takes integrity to tame an asshole
I generally agree with NJB, but this is a bit too pithy a take. Tyre design is a tradeoff between durability, efficiency, grip, and noise. All of these get better as the designs improve over time, but making tyres significantly quieter on short notice will come at the cost of more fine particulates, more CO2, or reduced safely, to some extent.
@@breintje91 "the first to make these tyres more quiet while keeping the other properties the same gets a happy meal. Go!"
@@Slimmeyy That will have to be quite a nice happy meal then xD
Development is expensive, and drivers buy tyres based on grip first and sound last, so hard to recoup the cost without government involvement.
As someone who is blind, I want quiet streets but I can’t have streets that are too quiet otherwise I can’t hear vehicles coming. Here in Australia we are trying to get the same legislation for electric cars and scooters because people with vision or hearing difficulties as well as the general public have had so many incidents. I love when I visit my Irish family, they live in the countryside and it’s just amazing to be able to not hear traffic constantly. When I come back to Sydney, for the first couple of weeks I can’t hear anything but the roads.
The biggest argument against road noise control: enacting a policy with concrete goals for the public good might encourage citizens to demand more policies with concrete goals for the public good.
Now that's just too much communism! Think of the poor Americans! (Am a poor American 😂)
But think about the profits of car manufacturers and oil magnates!!!
@@AndrooUK Imagine taking literal _Nazis_ at their word lmao
@@guy-sl3kr yeah. They did believe it was for the public good. They weren't just soulless demons, intent on nothing but inflicting suffering and furthering their own power. They were regular people, infected with a vile ideology. But the average Nazi truly believed that he was doing the right thing.
That's why we can't simply enact every policy that we think would be in the interest of the "greater good". We have to have more solid and specific reasons for any restrictions. We need data, grounded predictions, but most importantly of all, the consent of the People.
Now, for the matter in question, we probably have all three in most places in America, so it's probably irrelevant. Still, it's important to actually understand how and how not to run a society.
@@userequaltoNull Dude I know that Nazis weren't cartoon villains. But acting "for the public good" hardly counts when you don't believe most of the public are people. Thinking otherwise means genuinely believing Nazi propaganda... literally taking them at their word.
No one is arguing that we should blindly adopt every policy that can be justified with "public good" rhetoric. So what's your point here? That people can be dishonest about their true intentions? No shit.
My brother worked as expat in the US for a few years and noticed that everything is more noisy there. They don't have silent vacuum cleaners. And if you are in een hotel, beware that you are not close to a noisy ice maker in the hallway.
Everything is bigger, louder, and more obnoxious in America! 🇺🇸
Many of our vacuum cleaners are actually functionally quiet, but they are designed to produce more noise (and in some case they just have a speaker that plays noise) because we are such dunces that if the vacuum is silent we don't believe it is working. We're ... challenged.
@@BTHobbies same for car doors, aparently we can make them as good as silent closing those doors, but we humans like the 'thonk' noice it makes when shutting it.
it probably doesn't help that most American building are build with MDF, sorry I mean wood, so even someone upstairs walking without shoe you can hear them.
today i learned silent vacuum cleaners exist and i have seriously wanted few things more than one
I especially hate those drivers who would deliberately make their vehicles loud as hell. Like, okay, we get it, you just want to sound cool... But frankly, they're just making themselves inconsiderate and a nuisance to the city.
Yeah they can fuck off, bikes that are modded to be louder are the worst though
Come to NYC lol.
I live in the UK where vehicles that make more than 74 decibels of exhaust noise are already illegal, but no one cares, and the law never gets enforced. And I for one would vote for any political party (even a political party that I hate) that promises to crack down on them. That is how much I can't stand those things.
@@JontyLevine totally support this ! 💯
@@JontyLevine so you want your country to fuck up their economy, cause car too loud. damn you are dumb
My last house was on a fairly busy street with a speed bump literally 20 feet from my bed. Also, there was a biker bar down the road. My mood increased DRASTICALLY when I moved to a different house. I HATE motorcycles in the city so much.
Porous asphalt is also known as Pervious concrete. In Dutch it is called ZOAB (ZOA in Flanders), Zeer Open Asfaltbeton. It us used on 90% of the motorways of the Netherlands, and is awesome when driving in heavy rain -- the water just permeates through the asphalt, making not only a quiet, but also a safer highway during rain. The two disadvantages are the top layer is easier damaged during winter, and that that it is less safe under certain conditions (right after installation, there is less surface friction leading to slightly longer breaking distances; and during low traffic in winter, the salt spread on the road may disappear through the tiny holes. Particular due to the higher cost it is rarely used outside highways, or in neighbouring countries Belgium and Germany.
To add to this, in some places to further reduce noise pollution they've started laying double layered ZOAB.
Thank you for this extra info! So interesting.
It should also be noted that ZOAB is popular because it rains a lot more, and for much longer periods of time, than it freezes. So the cost of repair due to frost damage (may happen for only a week or two per year) is vastly outweighed by the cost of water damage and associated dangers.
So, this would probably be a good solution in places such as, where I live, the tropics, where it never snows and it's rainy season 2/3 of the year.
@@jelatinosa Probably, but you have to take into account that ZOAB requires a lot of foundational work (I'm no technician so it might have to do with weight). In the Netherlands, we have to put down tons and tons of sand, and let it sit as the ground is incredibly wet (at least in the west) and sand sinks in for quite a bit before it settles. I can only imagine that the sandbed needed in a junglefloor would be a factor X higher than in the peat and clay of the Netherlands. Factor in the cost, and for a lot of countries the cost alone would be too high to feasibly but in ZOAB.
My favourite reasons for banning loud vehicles from cities:
"interference with animal mating"
"they are really fucking annoying"
Lol. I live in a noise street in Brasil. I'm having problems sleeping because a Robin moved to the tree next to my apartament and sings from 1am from 8am all night.
And I can't even blame the guy. During the day he can't be heard by other robins anyway. And like all City birds he sings a high pitch variation of his song all nigh long.
Its not the car, it's the driver. Guns don't kill people
Even the loudest of all cars are quieter when they are driving in low rpm than in higher rpm's. Of course a lambo is stupid loud even when starting up, but it's worse if they bang throught the first gear to stop at the traffic light than if they were to drive it in comfort mode.
@@Daniel-dj7fh or put a friggin megaphone on the damn thing
like the opposite of a muffler.
@@Daniel-dj7fh just because it's quieter when driven slow than fast doesn't mean it's quiet.
@@aarontoussaint8364 yeah, but it's considerably more quiet. I've done some observing today and all the cars which passed me made more tirenoise than motornoise in a ~30kmh road infront of a school
Oh man, I live in 14-million citizens Moscow and I so much agree with you. There is not a single place in the city without the constant background humming of the cars traffic. Some people living on the first-line houses near high-traffic roads have to use earplugs to sleep at night because of the crazy noise-level.
А Битцевский лес? Там достаточно тихо, хотя Бордюрыч хочет лишить его статуса особо охраняемой природной территории, чтобы застроить всяким говном.
@@uis246 Даже там слышен фоновый гул от МКАДа, профы и севастопольского проспекта.
@@uis246 знаете, можно ещё прогуляться в центре. Например, в переулках возле Чистых прудов. О боже, как там спокойно и тихо. А всё почему? До крупных дорог далеко, и нет сквозного траффика. Только местные машины. Очень хорошее место...
@@ОльгаАйнанэ Это позиция "во дворах не так громко как на шоссе". Аналогия - "в Декабре не такой дубняк, как в Январе". Спасибо, КО.
И да, видимо это оправдание лишения Битцевского Леса статуса ООПТ.
@@uis246 мне кажется, что логика - не ваша сильная сторона. Я вообще ничего не говорила про битцу. Наоборот подтверждала, что транспорт - это основной источник шума в городе. И без него город - тихое место. А вы на меня накинулись, будто я лично лишила битцу охраняемого статуса. Не надо так
Great content.
I'm a motorcycle rider myself and absolutely hate loud exhausts.
In my opinion European mopeds are made loud by regulations, pushing under powered 50cc engines. The thing that drives me nuts is the ridiculous amount of 2stroke stinkers that roam around European cities. Thailand regulated those polluting things away decades ago.
That's made worse with CVT transmissions on scooters where you have no option but to rev the living 💩 out of them just to move.
Stepping up to a modern 4 stroke 100cc or more and using good baffles in exhaust systems, dramatically makes them quieter. When given a transmission with actual gears allowing you to shift early, then you're able to tick along at city speeds.
The psychological affects of living near or having to walk along a busy, noisy road, with outsize lorries mere feet from where we walk can’t be overstated.
or near regular routing railway lines.
I don't know what's worse, seeing the overhead type railway and living near the bridge or hearing them.
On walks with my big dog she cowers and gets close to me as massive freight trucks drive by. It makes me wonder what it does to me that I've just gotten used to.
In Poland in places that are above normal noise level they built noise blocking panels. And these are NOT those concrete reflectors but absorbers with special insulation which almost completely muffs loud car noise and even farting motorcycle.
Lots of places do that nowadays
@Łukasz Gliński --- I'd like to know the specifics of those noise barriers---what type of material they use; how that absorbs noise, rather than reflecting it; what they cost compared to concrete ones, etcetera.
Seems like something car and motorcycle manufacturers should pay for.
@@LoveToday8 That wouldn't be right, they just make the car, people who buy them then drive them is what makes the noise. It should come out of taxes like it already does
@@Joe_Rebel Car is the city is a luxury and we should it treat it that way.
My only experience with the Netherlands is visiting the Amsterdam airport and considering its size and number of people, even that was significantly quieter than other international airports like in Toronto. Kudos to the Dutch and I hope they inspire others to do better.
You just made me realize why I prefer riding my bike through the side streets rather than the main one despite better bike paths, it's all because of the car noise.
"they have a concrete plan, or is it an asfalt plan"
keep up the great scripts for the video's, I struggle with creative and funny scripts so much
I’m gonna get me one of those decibel meters. I want to take it to restaurants where they have all the “cool” high ceilings, hard floors, solid surfaces, and all manner of deafening architecture that interior decorators install without thinking about how it affects noise.
And then you open your own restaurant?
this is what a developed country looks like
@@sys-administrator does your life revolve around drugs? Why does everybody think legalized drugs equals progress?
@@sys-administrator Progressive only means drugs to you? We are the first to legalize same sex marriage which is a much more important one then your drugs that a lot of people don't even care about.
We also rank number 5 in both the good country index and the free country index. We are top of the world together with New Zealand and the Nordic countries.
@@sys-administrator Okay? 3 negatives versus a hundred positives? Ofcourse no country is perfect and even the number ones have things missing that other countries have instead.
And that wealth inequality thing aint even true. I'm looking it up but can't find proof about how we do worse then the US. Don't make stuff up...
@@sys-administrator You should check out this video. He explains about how that research appears to be wrong. I can't post a link somehow so you have to copy this very long title; ''REALLY!? The Dutch Economy is the Most Unequal? - a Response to Economics Explained''
@@sys-administrator The costs for an ambulance are reimbursed from the basic insurance. Which you and i both have, (i may hope)
I'm a Dutchie, but I live in a small town in a rural area where its so quiet you can hear your blood moving through the vessels in your ear, spoiled as I am I still think even Dutch cities are loud. I would probably be very miserable in any other city 😂
I used to live in Groningen, NL a couple of years. It is a bustling place, yet you can listen to conversations in a bar on the other side of the channel. noise pollution is truly something you only notice once it's gone.
Washington DC is a smaller city, but it enjoys many, many, many quieter neighborhoods just 2 or 3 blocks off larger traffic arteries. We need a consultancy and movement around CREATING new 15 minute neighborhoods with slowed traffic. We can draw candidates on maps and then target them for redesign and rezoning.
I remember staying in D.C. for a couple of days to interview for grad schools in the area and was absolutely FLOORED that I could walk out of my AirBnB to a breakfast café, smile at people sitting outside, and relax. Coming from Florida, it was mind blowing and almost made the decision for me lol
Almost as if people who are responsible for the laws were directly affected in that city... nah, that can't be it, right? :D
@@anthonythompson6053 I bet a patriotic themed "Do It Like DC!" or "Good Enough for Government!" would help many other cities. DC does things right with buildings and grounds. a) Building height restrictions gives us oodles of efficient 3 and 4 story buildings that don't need elevators but let heat rise. It's the right kind of "density." b) Outlawed heavy industry means less pollution. c) Great ratio of parks (and Rock Creek forest) to non-parks. d) Free "Circulator" busses between popular parts of the city. e) The Pentagon is our largest subway and bus terminal. And we have "bike lanes" right on our busiest downtown streets. f) Wide sidewalks with lots of Asian small restaurants and cafes. Beautiful train station and museums. 6) Several boat rental spots along the river. It's too expensive with Fed contractors and foreign diplomats. We need "DC Style" zoning and planning in some less expensive cities.
@@scottmcloughlin4371 Dutchy here who has visited DC about two years ago. It's just one big stroad, would not visit again. Who designs parks where stroads cross the entire park like every 400m. Bike lanes? What bike lanes? I didn't see anything that resembles a bike lane. The wide side walk where the restaurants are is not very useful because of the even wider stroad next to it. You are forced to sit inside due to all the noise.
For US standards DC might look good but absolutely nobody needs DC style zoning and planning. The mid-size housing of 3/4 story buildings is good start though.
Washington is good because it has the height limit on all buildings. So you get lots of 3-5 story buildings, like Europe.
When I lived in a city I got used to the “hum” of the city. I now live in a semi rural town in the mid Atlantic area. The noise here is driving me crazy. My days are filled with mowers, weed hackers, leaf blowers etc. It goes on all day, when one yard is done, it’s time for the next. And if you’re lucky, you get to live next door to someone who must be trying out for a role in a refilming of Tool Time - metal grinding, hammering, electric drill, gas powered chainsaw etc.
This noise is all the time. I have to keep a TV or radio on to drown it out, when I would rather just have quiet, maybe listen to the breeze and the birds (if there are any, can’t hear any).
I hate lawns.
BTW when I was a kid we lived a a house that was below and slightly away from a high train berm. I loved going to sleep when the really long commercial trains were running. It’s not just noise that bothers, it depends on what it is. And everyone is sensitive to different things.
It's true, babies go to sleep easier with a washing machine or other repetitive noise on. The worst neighbour I ever had was a power tool enthusiast.
I’d say the only good thing about my suburb is that there’s no grass lawns. Where I live grass isn’t reasonable for most people so we have rocks: no mowing! Just the occasional person doing yard work but it’s so much less frequent when the only things that need maintenance are trees, a couple shrubs and flowers and some quiet potted plants.
I know you meant to say "weed whackers", but I laughed way too much at the thought of 'weed hackers'!
@@InventorZahran it’s that Apple “autocorrect” again! Could have been worse 😁.
I'm sorry we all don't sit around crocheting and listening to podcasts all day. People do things.