I live in a high-rise condo next to a six-lane stroad that was even showcased on this YouTube channel and the 24/7 traffic noise is annoying, particularly when you want to go for a walk and can't even hold a conversation.
This didn't happen in the places where I lived back in Europe because zoning laws were different. Instead of the sprawl of freehold single family homes separate from a dense urban core, these much quieter towns had a preponderance of moderate-density areas with mixed use buildings. This means people can live within walking distance to where they work and where they shop, so they do just that: walk through quiet streets, often surrounded with trees. This moderate density also translates into frequent and fast public transit.
Overall it is a much more pleasant day-to-day living experience. And it is not unique to Europe, you can get the same experience in Japan, for example. I hope we can learn from them.
Say what you want about soviet city planning but it was damn efficient.
I have never ever seen a soviet-era suburb which didn't have 4 to 12 story buildings with parks and aisles all around them and all kind of services being at a 5 minutes walking distance top (church, shops, post office, elementary and middle school, etc).[1]
Literally under every building you would find people quietly enjoying their evening on the benches while watching their kids play all around in safety and green. All of those neighborhoods would be perfectly connected with city centers by public transport. Can't think of any of those places where from suburbs to downtown would take you more than 15/25 minutes top.
You could literally fit tens and tens of thousands of people in relatively small but very livable neighborhoods.
But cars have long ruined these kind of neighborhoods by reclaiming those places for parkings [2] (imagery is from 2017, in 2023 it is at least twice as dense in cars). People don't really enjoy their evenings chatting to each other because benches have been removed and kid playgrounds have been moved blocks away and everyone is sitting in their bunkers, uhm, homes, isolated from each other.
Maybe I might be romanticizing but honestly economical progress is such an overblown metric and progress does nothing but make people more and more lonely, anti social and unhappy. It was miles better when I was a kid in Poland.
This is something I heard a lot from people from the former GDR. Usually, they start by acknowledging the bad things: the limited opportunity to travel, the surveillance. But then, they tell you about what they miss. Knowing their neighbours, a certain idea of fraternity and togetherness in hardship, the feeling that even as a poor kid you could achieve something and be useful to society as a whole, the absence of really dire poverty.
I think people especially in the US are quick to dismiss the Soviet Republics while ignoring what they did get right and the alienating parts of their own culture.
In what sense is it "nothing like that"? France is quite socialist politically, as a poor kid you can aspire to obtain free and good quality education, get some help from the state if you are in poverty while relying on free health care.
What do you think bloc countries and Soviet union were? Some kind of communist utopias? They appear to "didn't have dire poverty" because "social parasitism"[0] was a criminal offense for a long time. Like, police (sorry, "militia"!) could stop you on the street during work hours and arrest you if you didn't have a document from your boss or from a doctor allowing you to skip work. In later times "undesirables" were just forcibly relocated from "nicer" places [1]. Unfortunately description of these in English are quite lacking, but as a person born in USSR I can assure you that all the nostalgia for that times is either coming from old people who actually just nostalgic for their youth (old joke on the subject: - Gradpa, why are you keep saying it was much better under Stalin? - Because I could still get an erection back then!), or intentional political propaganda.
I mean, no offense, but considering I actually talked with these people, it’s pretty obvious that they were born a decade after the death of Stalin. You do realise there was 36 years between Stalin death and the fall of the Berlin Wall, don’t you?
I don't think you're romanticising at all. I visited (of all places) Mariupol, in 2013. As a city built around the Azovstal steel works, it was still horrendously, actively polluted when I visited. But it also beautiful. Dozens of parks with ice rinks, sports grounds, lakes. Each soviet era block was surrounded by greenery, and despite the wide thoroughfares the city was indeed quiet and friendly. Not to say it was idyllic - the pollution was horrific, the poverty was grinding. With little in the way of pensions, the elderly people were forced to sell jams and preserves from their apartments to survive. Each building had an aging guardian in the doorway - and I was told my by Ukranian partner that part of their function was to prevent the apartments being stolen and sold out from under their residents. But in terms of urban greenery and place spaces, few places I've been, including relatively green bohemian cities like Berlin, come close.
Economical progress is certainly no guarantee of happiness, and hardships do often foster a sense of camaraderie that brings people closer together. Soldiers who have been in combat, for example, find that they miss the foxhole, even though getting shot at is no one's idea of a happy time.
> People don't really enjoy their evenings chatting to each other because benches have been removed and kid playgrounds have been moved blocks away and everyone is sitting in their bunkers
There's nothing about economic growth and material wealth that requires this to happen. Something else must have changed.
> It was miles better when I was a kid in Poland.
Most things are better as a kid, without the worries of adulthood, let alone parenthood. I'd imagine the outlook for your parents raising you in the People's Republic may have been different.
It's OK for some things genuinely to have been better for some people in some of the planned economies.
City planning looks to be better for children and perhaps average families for the reasons given. Similar projects were also built in the west, e.g. in the UK, but since they were only for poor people they suffered from inadequate maintenance, security and so on. Those either get demolished, or the green space filled in with more buildings.
> Something else must have changed.
Cars, that was the point. A one-lane access road was originally enough for deliveries, maintenance and waste removal; it would later be widened, then cars parked (legally or not) along the sides of the road or sidewalks. No one wants to sit on a bench and stare at a parked car, and the cars (parked and moving) make it more dangerous for children to play unsupervised.
> There's nothing about economic growth and material wealth that requires this to happen. Something else must have changed.
Agreed. When I was a kid we used to just roam outside (let alone walking to school and extracurriculars by ourselves).
That's no longer normal at exactly the same places even if objectively it is safer now. The perception of risk must be one thing that has changed but I think there's more to it...
> That's no longer normal at exactly the same places even if objectively it is safer now
Safer in terms of having less crime, perhaps?
What about the danger of being run over by a car on the way to those places? Nowadays we typically have more cars, with lower visibility, driving faster than before because the roads are wider, straighter and with more lanes. It is an environment that is plainly hostile to pedestrians and children in particular.
Probably... Haven't witnessed or heard of any pedestrian/car accidents in my home town to facilitate such a change.
On the other hand, biking would be definitely less pleasurable and more dangerous for smaller kids now. Even as adult I don't enjoy biking with many cars around.
> I have never ever seen a soviet-era suburb which didn't have 4 to 12 story buildings with parks and aisles all around them and all kind of services being at a 5 minutes walking distance top (church, shops, post office, elementary and middle school, etc).[1]
My stomach tingled just reading that, and then when I clicked the picture I felt real, panicked claustrophobia. If I believed in hell it would look like this. Maybe lots of people like living this way, but for me, no way. I'm a human. I'm not meant to be a bee living in a giant concrete honeycomb next to tens of thousands of bee neighbors buzzing around. I can't even imagine myself living that densely without having a mental break.
Anyone who says “things didn’t changed, it’s just nostalgia” needs to get rid of all the screens which stand in the way of them seeing the real world, at least for a while.
You can visit one city to capture this experience. Berlin was largely destroyed in WW II, many neighborhoods in the west and east were redeveloped with the support of the US and USSR, respectively.
You can smell the ideology behind these developments from miles away. No cars of course (not that people didn't want them, the central planners simply weren't good enough to create an environment in which they could be manufactured).
Cramped living conditions but ample communal space, so a lot of time is spent in full view of the neighbor (so they can report anti-communist behaviors to the local police). No individuality, identical buildings with the same layout for identical cogs in the machine.
(well, as long as your tiny piece of lawn stays green, your house is one of the five approved paint colors, and your HOA dues/conformity-fines are paid)
Better even: if you don't like the community, you can just leave and settle somewhere else that closer aligns with your value. No exit checks, no assigned housing.
I guess to the average worker in the East, these North American housing developments must have been seen as somewhat evil and not desirable at all.
> This means people can live within walking distance to where they work and where they shop
This is less common than you think. There are 8500 or so malls in Europe[0]. I happen to live near an (expensive) shop, which I use because I like walking places, but I also know I have a tech salary that lets me buy a place that's in walking distance of a shop, and afford to shop in it regularly.
Also, plenty of people don't live near where they work. Not very hot take: while for any new cities it's a good idea to try and take emissions into account, the best driver for lower emissions and more convenience isn't large-scale city planning. It's Zoom.
Maybe I missed it but does that article say what the mean square footage of these malls are or where they are placed?
In America we only have mega malls with giant square footage and the only way to get to them is by driving.
When I have been in Europe I’ve noticed very little in the way of American style malls within any city (let’s take Amsterdam as an example). I do find “malls” that might just be a few offices with street level retail selling Jack Wolfskin products and maybe a Starbucks but they aren’t all that distinguishable from most of the rest of the city.
In Columbus where I live the metro has a population of around 2.2 million (all drivers) and we have two malls that are still operating (I think we’ve had maybe 5 at one point?) and one is Polaris Fashion Place at 1.2 million square feet and the other is Easton Town Center which is 1.6 million square feet. That’s probably average for a city in America.
So for an average city in America I’ve got 0 walking or transit to the mall - 100% only drivers, and I’m at nearly 3 million square feet which is like top 10 easy on that list too.
Europe has malls. Sure. The question is does Europe have malls in the same way America does, and I’m not convinced the answer is yes, which is what really matters. Well, not me being convinced so much as all the associated driving.
Taking Copenhagen, there are two large shopping centres of 115,000m² and 58,000m², plus several more of around 15,000-30,000m². The smaller ones are generally a large (for Europe) supermarket in the basement, then other shops and restaurants on the ground and upper floors.
The two larger ones have commuter rail, metro, bus and cycle access, and parking for cars.
I'm sure the others have some parking, but it's not obvious as I've never used a car to visit one.
But, this city is the 'perfect' one, and there is a lot of range in-between. There are certainly large shopping malls in Europe with only road access, though they are almost certain to have bus services. Bluewater Shopping Centre just outside London is the first example that comes to mind.
It really depends on where you live of course. If you live on a farm, you can't expect to have a supermarket next door.
However, the number of shopping malls is irrelevant; most shops are not in malls. In cities, there's generally shopping streets that have a wide variety of all sorts of shops. In suburban areas, there's often a small shopping center with one or two supermarkets, a Chinese restaurant, a snackbar, and a couple of other shops. Big American-style malls are rare here.
And supermarkets are very common. Just Netherland alone has over 6000 of them, and at least 6 of those are within 1.5 km from my home. There's a shopping center 500 m from my house, and a major shopping steet 1 km in the other direction. Stuff is dense, exactly because it doesn't focus on massive malls.
And for anything they don't have in my neighbourhood, I take my bike.
Of course this is a city; in small villages you'll probably still need a car for anything beyond bread and basic groceries.
Not a "shopping mall" mall, but an old-school open area with shops and restaurants. I don't know if you watch Ted Lasso, but Lasso and Beard live right next to a mall and frequently walk through it or meet up at a bench there.
It's interesting that you call that area (from the TV show) a mall. It would never have occurred to me to call it that, it's just a normal mixed-use walkable part of a city.
I see this take about Japan all the time and do not understand it. No offence, but have you spent any time in Japan? Rural areas might be quiet for sheer low population density, but the cities are disgusting.
PM2.5 levels in Tokyo yesterday were like 6x WHO limits and absolutely no one on the local news was talking about it. Every morning I see pregnant and new mothers with infants or small children squeezing between belching diesel trucks, relentless car traffic, construction sites and smokers areas and wonder what the cost of all of this will be.
> PM2.5 levels in Tokyo yesterday were like 6x WHO limits and absolutely no one on the local news was talking about it
What are you talking about? Localities sent a smog alert, made announcements on the speaker, and there was a whole thing. It was a particularly hot day as well.
I don’t have that many reference points to be fair, but almost every time I’ve checked general air quality (at least according to the first site that describes AQI) for Paris has always been worse than Tokyo.
Of course things can be massively improved. There is a lot of noise pollution. But the conversations are relative to other places. My reference points are limited but on points like air pollution or smoking other major cities fare worse IMO.
Though this is all super subjective, and even within a city various parts of it have a vastly different vibe.
Air quality also wildly varies between streets, so it's hard to compare blindly across cities. Walking for just a minute down a side street can massively improve air quality compared to the main street.
It’s been like this for days, it will continue into next week. We had no announcements where I am, none of the news broadcasts I checked (and I checked a few) mentioned it. The Tokyo metro site wouldn’t even load on my phone. Glad you got a heads up.
Don’t really care what Paris is like, tbh. Shit air is shit air. Saying it’s shitter somewhere else isn’t super compelling.
The whole point of my original comment was that people elevate Japanese cities in ways they don’t deserve.
I do not know what to tell you, I was informed through like 3 different ways.
I think “Tokyo has better air than other metropolises” is a kinda verifiable thing, and if you grant that it’s kinda normal to consider that! There’s a reason lots of people end up here from other countries, and it’s not the pay!
EDIT: To clarify, if you checked accuweather.com yesterday morning you would’ve seen a pollution map flooded red, AQI 142.
Yep I know - but did you check how many monitoring sites they use and where they’re placed? It’s not representative of the actual experience of living here. If you’re walking, or cycling, you’re constantly in extreme close proximity to tailpipe emissions from cars and diesel trucks. The city also famously has lots of construction activity, almost always also belching diesel.
Yes, the number of pollution monitoring sites in Tokyo is quite extensive. They measure PM2.5,PM10,O3,NO2,SO2,and CO.
https://aqicn.org/map/tokyo/
This site keeps a detailed history.
I've witnessed the construction in Tokyo. I'm greatly impressed by the steps they take to monitor and reduce impact. I've seen many sites with noise monitors displaying in decibels the current noise inside and outside the construction site.
When a building across the street from my apartment was renovated I was sent detailed construction plans. The work was scheduled so that any noise would never interrupt sleep or evening relaxation. Also include was how the sunlight and shade from the new construction would change. Included was steps to take if one wished to protest the construction.
So where you're mistaken, or are not in accordance with the official narrative, is that the pollution must have to do with severe local negligence. Here[1] is simulation results that suggest a different story.
Not entirely sure what you’re saying but I’m literally, actually, living here and have been for 20 years. I’ve lived all over Tokyo and indeed elsewhere in Japan. I know what the air is like where people are actually living and working, as opposed to wherever the monitors happen to be placed.
There is loads of research showing a marked drop-off in the danger to humans from vehicle emissions as you move away from the kerbside. Even walking on the far side of a wide curb can significantly improve your prospects. My point here is that people are living in extreme proximity to tailpipe emissions, all day long.
It is a perfect candidate - perhaps the best candidate city in the world given how much else it gets staggeringly right on urban design - for strict tailpipe emissions regulations. Ban diesel trucks, introduce congestion charges, incentivise the adoption of EVs.
That is unlikely to happen, however, as Toyota in particular famously is one of the biggest global lobbyists for the internal combustion engine - a fact covered numerous times at length here on HN. That’s a fascinating political and economic story in its own right and one I’d encourage people to read up on.
Tokyo’s air quality is a story of corporate and political greed. Nobody does anything about it because no one talks about it.
This is a hilariously misleading take. Are you comparing Tokyo to a place with stroads or to living on a farm? I lived in Tokyo for 6 years. Yeah there’s a lot of traffic in Tokyo but the highways are underground or elevated and it’s a pedestrian paradise At least that mother and children can walk to interesting things instead of drive everywhere. And in the neighborhood they live in, there are likely quiet streets and a grocery store within blocks.
Even where there are large roads, like near Shibuya station, there’s no street parking and cars are passing through, not driving across the sidewalk to every storefront. Pedestrians definitely come first. The parkades are often attended to direct traffic and pedestrians.
I can’t comment on yesterday but PM2.5 levels are often on the news.
Construction sites? Yeah, it’s a city. But most construction is fast. I now live in a small
But growing European city and part of the sidewalk downtown has been closed down for three years for ongoing demolition of a building. Now it looks like construction is just starting. And this is for a 5 or 6 stores building.
Smoking areas outside of stations are gross in Japan but it’s rude or forbidden to smoke in crowded areas. In Europe people smoke on the train platform, at the bus stop and right outside of every restaurant.
I did think of one thing that is loud and annoying in Tokyo though: 50cc scooters. Making those quiet ought to be low hanging fruit.
It’s not misleading at all. The best part of Tokyo’s urban design are its mixed-used neighbourhoods and extensive public transport network. As you say, that makes it great for walking and cycling. In theory.
In practice, when combined with the high density, it means that people are spending a lot of time outside, unprotected, in very close proximity to the tailpipe emissions from large volumes (often 4 or 6-lanes) of gasoline and diesel-burning trucks and cars. Often with narrow sidewalks or no sidewalks at all. They shop along the main road, their kids’ school is on the main road, their workplaces, gyms, dry cleaners, station, etc.
Lol at the people in this thread chiming in from their 3rd floor balconies in Moto-Azabu Hills. The absolute vast majority of people living in Tokyo are breathing trash air day in day out.
It’s reprehensible. They need to ban diesel trucks immediately, and they need to actively encourage people to switch to EVs.
I agree with some of your points such as trucks should switch from ICE but this will happen, you see company trucks start to advertise that they are hybrid and the buses are being switch to hydrogen buses. But Tokyo is hardly an industrial hellscape. You’re kind of describing traffic right near a major station but usually a bike commute to a major station can mostly be done on side streets, and in many areas you can do your shopping in shotengais (pedestrian only shopping street). It’s funny you mention gyms and dry cleaners because there are thousands of these in Tokyo, and small neighborhood has one. Your nearest one is unlikely to be a major station unless you live right next door to one.
I actually like the no sidewalk small streets, they have no parking and while some are sketchy they are more often like a mixed use path where pedestrians clearly have the right of way.
Is there some huge increase of cancer/emphysema/early death in Tokyo vs rural Japan? I never heard of it if that's true, and I'm pretty interested in Japanese culture and history along with that of China. I would imagine I would have come across such stats at some point if people in Tokyo were dropping like flies vs more pristine parts of Japan.
I’m completely uninterested in having that debate so will cede the floor to someone more knowledgeable.
If you still think, in 2023, that humans can skate by with no consequences from relentless exposure to the by-products of fossil fuel combustion, I’d invite you to crack a book.
I just walked out onto my 3rd floor balcony in Tokyo at 8:30pm and my watch says it is 38dB. I can hear some light car traffic in the distance. I live about a 20 minute walk to Shibuya crossing, so not exactly rural. I also live about 100m from Yamatedori which is a giant arterial road.
I used to live in NYC. Tokyo is a very quiet city. Not all parts for sure... you can have an apartment by a train crossing or they might build a highway outside your 6th floor window, but I would say that most of the parts where people live is pretty quiet.
Are there trees and soft planting at street level? NYC is very plant bare by comparison to London for example. And they absorb a lot of the noise. Hard surfaces just reflect and amplify the noise.
Yes. Tokyo has a lot of shrubs and small trees planted on any available median or unused sidewalk space throughout the city. I think that helps. There is also some small effort put in to plant ivy or other climbing plants on things like highway ramps.
> PM2.5 levels in Tokyo yesterday were like 6x WHO limits and absolutely no one on the local news was talking about it.
According to [1], yesterday's peak of PM2.5 (not the 24 hour average) in Tokyo was at 22 µg/m3, whereas according to [2], the WHO's (extremely strict) limit for 24 hour average is set at 15 µg/m3. Where did you get your data from?
You can see graphs with the tabs named Live, Week, Month, Year. We can check past data there. The weekly graph shows 72 AQI on May 18th. The yearly graph shows the annual average of 39 AQI.
Is that the 24 hour average? I literally have photos on my phone from Thursday morning showing AQI 142 and a Tokyo map soaked in pink and red. I snapped them to send to my wife, who was planning to take the kids to the park. It was also obvious to anyone with a functioning noise on their face. Not sure what to tell you.
Likely the same extended lifespan that's been prevalent in Japan over the past century of smoking, diesel and construction (along with the occasional nuclear catastrophe). Humans are apparently more ruggedized than they look on paper.
You are just one sentence away from saying "human quality of life doesn't matter, we must think of the economy".
Shortness of breath is something doctors report as a more and more common symptom of city dwellers.
Not reported on the news because nobody -- apparently you included -- cares, but I've been to doctors lately, and they complained that the lung and heart doctors are overbooked lately while the others have a normal load.
This could also be because people don't go out as much - perhaps for fear of pollution.
Generally, it takes a lot of pollution to counter the positive health effects of active commuting. It was a while since I did the research, but someone estimated that you need to cycle for more than sixteen hours per day for the pollution to outweigh the cardio benefits in the 90th percentile of cities ordered by pollution. There was no city for which any mount of cycling would have made you worse off.
Granted, walking is probably slightly lower in intensity, but still.
Any chance you remember the source of this estimation ?
It’s been 15 years I commute daily by bike and worry about the side effect on my lungs… sometimes the road stinks so much, especially when too much trafic jam. Trying to slow my pace to breathe « less deep » but not a fun things to do.
Sure, that might be a factor but I honestly have no clue where to get out. Me and my wife just always land in the local restaurant which is 10-15 minutes away because there's literally nothing walkable in 30 mins foot radius.
So yeah we gave up and just go eat out. :|
So not only is the air bad, the walkable places are few and far between, strongly discouraging people to even go where the better air is or, as you said, just have the cardio from walking/cycling to improve your health.
Perhaps chronic illness is more prevalent now because in previous times you would have just died from those conditions. Anyway, if you're living 20 years longer on average than your grandparents, it stands to reason that your health is better for at least some of those years, since you're not dead.
Well not all Japanese cities are the same, and it is unfair to categorize a megalopolis like Tokyo as one thing or another as it's too varied for that.
While Tokyo does have no shortage of highways and cars they do have plenty of mixed zone medium density, walkable areas that are free from car noise. That is not a feature of any part of most US cities except maybe the CBD. It is also much more uncommon to find stroads in Japanese cities, while a stroad is the default for many western cities.
Sure, smaller cities are better than big cities. Less dense cities are better than denser cities. All else held equal.
The neighbourhoods you’re referring to - walkable areas free from car noise - are open to the wealthy only. The absolute vast majority of people in Tokyo live with constant traffic noise and terrible air quality. Not to mention cramped living conditions.
It definitely is difficult, thank you. It also seems to me to be of limited value unless you’re specifically trying to measure the effect of different policies. Let’s just do what we can to improve air quality everywhere. We know diesel bans work, we know EVs work, we know congestion pricing works. Let’s just do it - especially for our kids. Doesn’t seem particularly controversial to me.
>No offence, but have you spent any time in Japan?
As someone who moved to Japan it's always funny. I think people literally get their impression from Japan solely from neo-Tokyo sci-fi from the 80s. The country has taken some of the worst cues from the US.
Many cities like Tokyo are 75% suburban, single home, it's in fact the largest suburban region on the planet. The number of cars in the country is much higher than in the rest of Asia and many cities are extraordinarily sprawlish. From the air Tokyo literally just looks like a sort of denser LA (https://i.redd.it/mghcpc5xvt761.jpg)
If people are looking inspiration in Asia, Singapore is a much better place to look at, it deliberately designed around green spaces and avoidance of cars.
> From the air Tokyo literally just looks like a sort of denser LA
I love aerial photos of megacities like this. But I would say "a sort of denser LA" is understating it a little; each of the small buildings in the Tokyo aerial that are too tiny to make out are probably 5-6 stories at least.
Okay, well, more than 20 years living here and I reckon the air quality is terrible and that in 2023 it should be a much higher priority than it is. I have to raise my kids here.
I’m sure the total absence of zero emissions vehicle options has absolutely nothing to do with the political influence of the Japanese automotive lobby.
Somebody else in the thread showed you actual objective data on air pollution and you brushed it off. In Japan a substantial majority of people commute by transit, mostly by rail. How would air pollution be affected if as many people commuted by car as they typically do in North America? Cars are the subject of this post.
On a post discussing car noise pollution in North America you have spent hours and dozen of comments whinging about how terrible air pollution is in Tokyo and dismissing anybody presenting you with data. Do you have anything to contribute to the topic?
Hey man, I was responding to a comment that brought up Tokyo. I could talk about Tokyo air quality all day, yeah. Because I live with it. If you don’t want to talk about that, just stop talking about it maybe?
A comment, about a YouTube video, on a channel 100% dedicated to exploring the devastating impact of the automobile on urban design over the past century and on the people who live in those places.
It’s not NA-focused, by the way. The guy lives in the Netherlands. The reason NA cities come up for pillorying so often is because he’s originally from London, Canada, and because of the special historical circumstances that led to cleansheet design-by-car for a huge number of NA towns and cities.
Everybody wants clean air, they just live with the bad one because the big city pays well (though when you correct it for costs of living, it gets muddier).
What’s impossible about it? Where are the bans on diesel trucks in the city centre? Where are the zero emissions vehicles visible in just about every other metropolis? Where are the congestion charges? Bike lanes? Tree cover?
This is a political problem and as long as the Japanese auto lobby has the LDP in their pocket, we who live here live the consequences.
You’re saying other cities’ air quality experience is totally irrelevant in some posts and then making a direct comparison to policies that other cities have implemented in this post. It doesn’t seem a consistent position to me.
IMO, what other cities do (and the results they get) is relevant when discussing what’s good, bad, or practically possible.
I said Tokyo has shit air. Then came a chorus of whataboutists saying it wasn’t as bad as London, NYC, Bangalore. I said that’s irrelevant: dirty air is dirty air. You said I was asking the impossible, I said what about policies that actively target tailpipe emissions? To improve air quality here, in Tokyo. The city in which I have lived for most of my adult life.
You claim that "I said Tokyo has shit air" while ignoring the parent comment you responded to.
The comment you responded to was about how this low noise experience is not unique to Europe, and saying Japan has similar experiences.
You came in with "Tokyo has shit air" as a response. Now you claim the others are "whataboutists" when they are merely continuing the original conversation topic comparing Europe with Japan.
Europe is definitely not a monolith with regards to noise. Loudest place I’ve ever lived is Barcelona. Was a one-way side street but the scooter noise was still insane. Cars make a lot of noise but at least in my city-living experience across both Europe and US people at bar closing times, parties, construction, scooters and motorcycles are far worse for noise affecting quality of life. Also remembering what it was like to live next to the L in Chicago forever ago… that was loud.
Cars have more trouble going fast through narrow streets, so they go slower. Motorcycles and scooters in the city tends to have small engines for fuel economy and price, so they have to run at much higher RPMs compared to cars for the same speed. They also have much less ability to dampen the sound because the exhaust system can only be so long. Then there are people who purposely put loud pipes on. They are better space and efficiency wise, but in terms of low speed noise they sure are worse. Two wheeled vehicles don't tend to encourage the kind of space waste in north american suburbia though, so I think they are still preferable.
What's really helping is that scooters/mopeds are increasingly electric, and some of the people that used to ride noisy scooters now ride e-bikes. The sooner we get rid of those fuming noise buckets, the better.
I was surprised in how much Beijing changed from 2010 to 2020. In 2010 it was loud scooters every where, and by 2020, it was a majority of electric scooters / e-bikes, which has made a big different in some parts of the city.
And when roads are noisy, they get noise screens to contain it.
While Dutch highways tend to have speed limits of 100-130 kph, the A-10 ring highway around Amsterdam has one section that's limited to 80 kph because it passed through a densely populated area of the city. There's big apartment blocks right next to the highway (and one offramp passes straight through a building), so traffic has to go slower to keep noise levels down.
If the US doesn't even do that, I think that tells you something about how much cars are prioritised over people.
That sounds like what I was talking about. If the US does have them, that's great. But a lot of videos of the US that I've seen showed big roads through residential areas with no noise barriers around them. And with people here complaining about the noise, it's clearly not being used enough in all parts of the US.
Although of course noise barriers are just one of many tools. Less cars and having cars drive more slowly probably accomplish a lot more.
Noise barriers aren’t a ‘US’ thing. It would be up to the local state or county or city to build them so your results may vary. If you catch yourself saying ‘the US does this or that’ then reconsider the question bc the US doesn’t ‘do’ anything one way or another. It’s a collection of 50 states and thousands of localities.
Note that while you point out this happened in specific areas you've lived in, there are unfortunately plenty of places in Europe where you'd face the same issue.
>>This means people can live within walking distance to where they work and where they shop, so they do just that: walk through quiet streets, often surrounded with trees.
it would take more than changing zoning laws for that, as I understand changing jobs and such is not as common in these locations as well. If you are changing jobs every couple of years having to find a home in the same neighborhood as your new job may be a challenge.
Also I prefer not be limited in my shopping choices just to the single shop that happens to be in my building or on my block...
> Also I prefer not be limited in my shopping choices just to the single shop that happens to be in my building or on my block...
I live in a mid-sized European city, and I have literally dozens of shops within 10-minute walking distance of home, as well as several banks, primary and high school, health center, several playgrounds, parks, gyms, plenty of bars and restaurants, etc.
Do they all sell the same goods, or do you have "dozens of shops" that all specialize in a few things, like you have a bakery, coffee shop, produce shop, butcher,hardware store, etc all as independent shops
Or do you have a Kroger, Mejier, Walmart, HEB, Lowes, and HomeDepot style shopping all with in walking distance...
Even if you focus on a category of shops what I said is still true, for most categories. Dozens of food shops, dozens of bakeries, dozens of fruit shops, dozens of clothes shops, dozens of supermarkets, maybe 5 or 6 hardware stores.
> Also I prefer not be limited in my shopping choices just to the single shop that happens to be in my building or on my block...
And I prefer not living with constant traffic noise and at risk of being run over every time I step outside. I prefer biking with my kid to his school, but we can't because the traffic makes it a suicidal idea. I also prefer to listen to birds when I walk to the shops nearby, but the traffic noise drowns them.
Yes here we are, Here we are were the majority have self selected to live in the way I prefer, but people want to use government violence (i.e regulation) to force people to live in a manner they did not self select.
I have no problems if people want to create something voluntarily that is walkable, I have massive problems with using government to do it.
Is it not equal "government violence," then, to make illegal buildings without a certain number of parking spaces attached, or that take up more than a certain percentage of the lot area, or have more than a certain number of units, or would add a café or corner store to a residential zone? Your preferred development patterns are the government-enforced ones, currently.
> I prefer, but people want to use government violence (i.e regulation) to force people to live in a manner they did not self select. [...] I have massive problems with using government to do it.
We are on the same page, then. In most of American and Canadian cities municipal zoning bylaws force the construction of single-family homes and disallow the construction of mixed-use moderate density buildings.
With that in mind, one may begin to wonder if the reason we don't see more walkable neighborhoods is because they are currently illegal to build, not because there is no demand for them. And, indeed, there is plenty of demand for them.
What are you talking about? We are in this position precisely because of government regulation prioritizing cars. Most of American cities are still only zoned for SFH within the city limits. It’s nearly impossible to build in any other way because of regulation. Not to mention the many many subsidies for the auto industry.
The thing that frustrates me most about libertarians is how everything they don’t want is regulation or government spending, but everything they do want is provided by the grace of god or something.
Trees are harder but I think noise can be mitigated at personal levels, you just have to avoid 国道沿い(kokudo zoi, "along highways") and 線路沿い(senro zoi, "along rails") apartments. Tokyo is an impacted and upscaled melon skin, edges of Voronoi cells being roads and scars being rails. Towards the center of cells are quieter.
>This means people can live within walking distance to where they work and where they shop, so they do just that: walk through quiet streets, often surrounded with trees.
So they have quiet bars were people quietly get wasted and quietly walk home? Quiet trucks quietly unloading goods for the shops every morning? Quiet dumpster trucks quietly picking up commercial dumpsters and quietly flipping them over every night?
If we had these in the US I'd be fine with mixed zoning too. As of now I don't hear any noise from the two lane arterial street behind my backyard but I used to live in an apartment with a window roughly 500' away from a small bar (just a local watering hole in a strip mall, completely inside, not trendy at all) in a direct line of sight and I had to sleep with a white noise machine because of all the screaming the patrons produced walking out (or in?).
What this tells me is that the internal combustion engine is a bad idea everywhere but especially in a dense urban core.
People like both the dense urban core and the suburb single family home life style. They are very different modes of life. A lot of Europeans I know really like one or the other because they don’t really get them back home.
The solution to road noise doesn’t have to be a dramatic rezoning and a reversion to Europe everywhere. It could be to make cars and trucks quieter.
(N.b., I’m specifically not addressing SFH and housing shortages in this, hopefully that’s for a different thread)
I also thought EVs would be quieter but as they became more common in my street I noticed they’re only a little quieter than internal combustion cars from the moment they reach a certain speed (say 30km/h).
Most of the noise comes from the tire friction and aerodynamics.
Urban core traffic is slow moving and dominated by engine noise. In fact it’s generally dominated by public transit noise - massive double length buses, of services - garbage trucks. Tire noise is more an issue for folks living next to high traffic thru routes.
A city on its own generally has the power to change zoning and land use laws. There are limitations (some states give cities more or less power here) but generally cities do have the ability to make changes that would reduce noise and improve quality of life for their residents.
On the other hand, cities do not have the ability to redesign cars. A city can’t just choose to invent a quieter car!
I would love it if we can engineer cars and trucks to be quieter; I think though that a more feasible path for any city is to work on zoning and land use changes.
> What this tells me is that the internal combustion engine is a bad idea everywhere but especially in a dense urban core.
Engine noise only dominates up to roughly 20mph, at higher speeds the tire noise is the dominating component until roughly 100mph where wind becomes the dominant.
So this:
> The solution to road noise doesn’t have to be a dramatic rezoning and a reversion to Europe everywhere. It could be to make cars and trucks quieter.
Would mean both switching to electric cars and reducing speeds significantly to less than 20mph.
I don’t think that average speed is the relevant measure here. Top speeds would still be noisy.
But even at average speed you’d see no noise reduction from electric cars since 20mph is the point where tires are as loud as the engine. So the average would need to go down.
Cars aren't loud because of the engines. A Tesla driving by isn't much louder than an equivalent ICE-powered alternative. A lot of the noise is the air resistance and the tyres.
Not in the urban core. Speeds are low in the urban core. Further, in my personal experience, busses make up most of the egregious noise with their extraordinarily loud ICEs. Some cities like SF have electric busses and they’re materially quieter than say NYC or seattle which have behemoth ICE noise death machines.
I lived on the 36th floor of a residential in a mixed-use area. Traffic noise was a low background sound, but the HVAC and mechanical systems of nearby office buildings were astonishingly loud.
You can get noise pretty much everywhere, and can also get used to it. I lived once in a basement level with old tram lines in front of the house and it was like in those slapstick movies - the glass of water would fall off your bed stand. Yet you got used to it, although I couldn't call it "healthy".
Not very helpful to generalise about Europe in that way. It is a big place with a variety of zoning laws and plenty of examples of road, rail and air transport noise affecting homes.
this is why EV's can't come soon enough, I live near a street and tire sound is pretty loud but it's the Harleys, oversized pickups, and fart can compacts that took some getting used to.
One is that we need to come up with comprehensive solutions for reducing the number of vehicles in use. But that’s a difficult problem where solutions take decades and must be tailored to each scenario.
But what can be addressed now is the engine and exhaust sound levels. Some vehicles are loud because their engines are working hard, but many vehicles are loud because people (boys) want them to be loud. For some reason there is a large percentage of people who equate loud with good or cool.
Some of these unnecessarily loud vehicles are so loud that your home windows will rattle when they drive by. The worst are the Harley style motorcycles, but some crappy two stroke scooters can also be deafeningly loud.
Ironically, there is even an electric car in my village that makes a noise (to improve pedestrian safety), but the noise is so loud that it sounds like a street sweeper vehicle vacuuming the road.
Meanwhile, in this “peaceful” village I live in, there is always someone with some lawn or other machine making loud noise.
Essentially, noise is just another form of pollution that some people assume is unavoidable and just accept while others revel in producing.
Imagine buying aftermarket parts so your car would spew oil around it as you drive. Then imagine being proud because of how much oil your vehicle sprayed. It’s absurd, but it’s the same thing with boys and their loud toys.
I think you’re focusing on the wrong issue here. Engine noise nowadays is a lot less of a problem than tire noise, especially with cars going 50km/h+.
Some cars are loud because people want them to be, most cars are loud because the noise the tires make when driving is loud, and that only gets worse the more cars you have around.
Not my experience. I live next to a 40mph dual carriageway which is an arterial route. The road noise is pretty much constant, and I don't find it that disturbing (although my recently-moved-in partner differs on this). What is disturbing to everyone is the sound of loud-exhaust boyed up sheds which drive past pretty much every day. There's one guy who has made his car backfire, and does this pretty much every time he drives past, at around 11pm each night. Incredibly annoying, selfish behaviour.
It's not that simple. Tyre noise produces a roughly "white noise" profile. This kind of noise is easy to attenuate using physical barriers and people can sleep with it (some people even sleep better with it).
It only takes one engine in a thousand to drown out everything else. They are specifically designed to produce a "note" and explosions which are highly irregular and impossible to not hear.
Loud engines should be repaired if possible and destroyed if not. But total road noise should also be taken into account and accounted for with increased vehicle tax.
IMO you are both right at the same time, there were even studies published here on HN saying that background far-away engine noise is very harmful for the humans when we're exposed to it for prolonged periods of time.
There are zero cars making disruptive tire nosie at 2:00am in my neighborhood.
Actually, wait, there is one asshole on a scooter who locks his wheels & creates incredible shrieking horror "omg an accident is happening" sounds at every intersection he stops at. But that too is not regular tire noise, it's another boy child antisocial asshole.
There's different situations. Sometimes yes tire noise is an issue. The video has one of my favorite bits, 'why did this not take off? Because car makers are assholes' or some such. The aggregate noise can be a problem. But I think the video is spot on. Car drivers don't have any conception of how fucking obnoxious to hundreds of people it is that they blow their horn. They love shitty preening pathetic loud cars. It's only like 10% of them, but those 10% of car drivers are anti social assholes with enormous ability to make life much worse for everyone. And most societies have almost no restraints, no ability to create counter pressures against the anti-social.
My experience is the same as other commenter's, standard road noise is basically white noise, the people with loud cars (I'm not a car guy, but probably messing with the exhaust in some way?) is what you notice. The worst offenders are even louder than a fully loaded dump truck.
There's a key relationship you're missing here. The closer a car is to humans, the slower it will drive. The slower it drives, the more important engine noise is.
A car going 50km/h+ is on some sort of a highway, where noise and pollution are less relevant. It's the cars going <50km/h on residential streets that cause problems.
Empirically, engine noise dominates then. The difference between ICEs and EVs passing by is staggeringly obvious.
>50 km/hr inside cities is very common nowadays, especially in N. america.
I attribute it to two factors:
- wide streets
- modern cars' excellent isolation from the external environment. You don't hear the speed. You don't feel the speed. You feel all snuggled, safe and tight (seatbelts).
> Engine noise nowadays is a lot less of a problem than tire noise, especially with cars going 50km/h+
True, I live next to a 60km/h road (so everyone drives 80km/h at least) and I have been noticing that EV's are just as loud as ICE cars. The only difference is the ICE's have an additional tone to them, but that doesn't make them much louder to me, just different. However the real issue is motorbikes and mopeds which don't have any exhaust dampening (or removed it).
I live next to a large road in NYC and for me the cars that are loud intentionally are by far the biggest problem when it comes to noise, followed by sirens and horns. The things that are designed to be noticed are the most noticeable.
I also live in NYC: typical vehicle traffic is background white-noise. I absolutely agree that the major disruptive noise sources from cars are sirens, horns, alarms and obviously-illegal exhaust modifications.
As I've already gone down the urbanest/transportation rabbit hole and have watch every Not Just Bikes video and other stuff in that space, I have a different perspective than you. I do think I would have shared some of your views a few years ago.
We don't need to come up with solutions. Countries around the world have already. Some of the larger cities in the USA have started making these changes and seeing results.
The solutions don't need to be comprehensive. While an accepted comprehensive plan maybe nice it does put all the planning up front and makes the projects take a very long time. Doing small things that push people to take other transport options doesn't need to take forever. As many cities demonstrated during the pandemic.
In the USA I think the biggest issue will be political will. But the one thing I'd like to see take off is cities removing parking minimums for new businesses or construction. The minimums were arbitrarily set and stop people from building small businesses. The parking minimums spread things out and drive the need to do something other than walk. Strong Towns has a video on it that does a better job than I can.
In short I believe comprehensive guide to being to reduce cars in cities exist at this point.
The biggest issue in the US is the will to change things. As you've mentioned, during the pandemic, we've seen how rapidly things can change when everyone is aligned in one direction. Whether you agree with those changes or not the fact is many cities had al fresco dining , and portions of streets reclaimed for it in as little as a year.
Another interesting observation I've had about the US is that commercial space for rent always tends to look way larger than it needs to be! Instead of subdividing a space and cutting the rent potentially in half many commercial units are huge and I can only imagine the rent is so high that only the big chains can afford to rent them.
Of course this also means that things tend to be a little less quaint and walkable, because instead of having 2/3 small businesses you have a massive chain in it's space.
I live in a fairly walkable area in Los Angeles (go figure right?) and I can't tell you the amount of giant open commercial / retail spaces I see that have been dormant for quite a while. I can't help but think I'd they were to slice up the space they would be filled in no time.
Related to noise pollution a good framework for thinking about cars and car traffic is comparing them to industrial activity.
A 6 lane or 8 lane highway is like a big chemical plant. You wouldn’t want that in your neighborhood or near your city. It’s a big industrial site.
A tree-lined road with protected bike lanes, sidewalks, cars parked on either side, and a 20 mph speed limit is like a nice coffee shop just a few blocks from your house. It’s like a small business. You do want those in your neighborhood.
I’d also like to add, I just moved back to a neighborhood in the city and it’s much quieter to me than the suburbs. What you forget is that in the suburbs people are mowing and lead blowing and doing all those activities and they add a lot of noise. Didn’t notice as much when working in the office but noticed it much more when working from home. Now that I’m back in the city the car traffic noise is somewhat the same maybe a little worse, but the landscaping noise is far less prevalent and then I’m left with really not a lot of noise.
If you want to further the analogy you can think of those of us screaming about car-only infrastructure and the negative effects caused by it as the same people screaming about pollution during the industrial revolution.
The long march of time will remove car-only infrastructure because it can't outlast economic physics, but we should do it faster to limit the damage and save hydrocarbons for spaceships and medicine and stuff.
Unfortunately we won't have our Triangle Shirt Factory or smog prevalence to really put the problem in your face. If we put some sort of coloring in car exhaust so you had to see it we'd ban cars within a year.
I live on an artery/thoroughfare in SF. My street also has a 10-15' retaining wall along one side that faces a small valley on the other. The noise on my street is extremely loud and echoes throughout the whole neighborhood. My favorite days and nights are Sundays when streets are the quietest. Here's how I've ordered the worst offenders in my head.
1) Harley's with open pipes
2) cars without any exhaust (common)
3) after market exhaust on import cars (thanks Fast & Furious)
4) garbage trucks, gas powered gardening equipment, 4x4's/big trucks, new muscle cars
5) scooters, mopeds, gas powered bicycles, motocross motorcycles (I get sideshows/giant groups driving up/down my street to the next location), enduro & regular motorcycles
The thing is is that there are already laws in place to deal with most of those..
I’m of course happy covid is a bit more under control, but I can’t help but feel sad we’re back to the noise levels we had pre-covid. For a short period of time near the beginning of the pandemic we got to experience Bay area cities without being surrounded by extreme levels of car noise pollution; it was incredible to imagine what that would be like as a normal part of living here.
To be clear, I am speaking for pretty much all “car guys” to say we also hate popcorn tunes and stance too. These are both (inter-related) trends only popular with the very young and very low class promulgated via Tik Tok.
No “car guy” is impressed by a busted up 20 year old BMW 318i with a popcorn tune, straight pipes, and rep wheels, but there’s a lot of barely 20-somethings who think it’s cool yet don’t know the first thing about how cars work.
Texas is full of "adult" men who want their trucks (and any type of vehicle made by Dodge) to be louder than stock. If their exhaust doesn't set off car alarms when they drive by, it's not loud enough.
I'm pretty sure they're talking about popcorn tunes (also called "crackle tunes") which intentionally makes your car backfire so it sounds like a poor man's version of rally anti-lag, but in the process destroys the catalytic converters, fuel efficiency, power output, and is generally obnoxious. Rolling coal isn't even a thing in Europe, and the folks I was responding to sound like they're in Europe.
There's a bunch of various things "kids these days are doing" because of social media and their craving of attention, that are frankly completely stupid and objectively bad, but get them attention due to being obnoxious. Carolina squat, stance, and popcorn tunes all fall into this category. Stance kids in particular /know/ they're doing something objectively stupid and dangerous and respond by putting "locally hated" stickers on their car. There's a lot of kids, especially in the West, without good family life and too much exposure to social media who will do anything, no matter how obnoxious or objectively wrong, to get attention, even negative attention. This is just how it extends to cars. We all hope they grow out of it, because otherwise they're destined to be wastes of the oxygen they're breathing.
I'm pretty sure they're talking about lots of things, primarily vehicles that "make your windows rattle". Popcorn tunes don't do that, the frequencies are too high and the impulses too quick. The description fits Harleys (as literally stated in their comment) as well as big rumbly trucks with knobbies and a straight-piped exhaust.
To your first point, I think it’s a mistake to assume that the current situation is the natural result of our cities, where as it’s actually policy decisions that add up over time.
If 50 years ago, cities prioritized travel methods for walking and biking, the noise pollution this video describes wouldn’t be so prevalent.
> reducing the number of vehicles in use. But that’s a difficult problem
That's not a difficult problem (except in cases like sloped terrain etc.) - and the solutions are known and readily available. They are not even expensive, socially. The problem is:
1. Increasing awareness and understanding of the alternative and the solutions available to get there.
2. Translating public interest/will into political action by municipal administrative bodies.
3. Rearrangement of resources away from private expenditure on cars and their maintenance, and national expenditure on roads, into municipal (and perhaps national) expenditure on mass transit systems.
... and these problems, or at least their combination, is what's difficult.
My experience living in a relatively quiet area has been that the loudest vehicles, by far, are garbage trucks followed by other kinds of trucks. But it is much harder to do something about that because they serve an economic purpose and it would presumably be very expensive to make them quieter. It's a lot easier to blame people with gratuitously loud cars and motorcycles because they don't have a real excuse, even if they have less of an impact in absolute terms.
Garbage trucks are on any given street for maybe 10 minutes a week and they save you a trip to the dump. Reducing the noise on them would be great but this is not nearly the most impactful way to solve the city noise problem.
I have to say there’s a strange fixation on making ICE quieter. EV’s are so quiet you have to add things to them to make a little noise so they don’t run people over. I’d much rather see cities move towards EV and build out EV infra than try to figure out how to make Rube Goldberg machines more complex to reduce their noise by 10%, while not addressing the rest of the ills.
There are non trivial problems to solve with EV in the city. Solve those instead of propping up age of fire dinosaur juice machines.
I don't think OP is referring to the ICE that are already making some efforts towards quiet, I think they're referring to the engines that to the casual observer seem like they have a horn instead of a muffler to maximize noise output.
I definitely felt this when walking through the city center of Florence last fall. The streets and piazzas were jammed with thousands of tourists but it felt remarkably quiet, due to the almost complete absence of cars.
The noise of actual people on the street is also quite pleasant. Talking, laughing, footsteps, etc. it positively adds to the atmosphere rather then detract from it.
I guess that depends on opinions, there is a committee of citizens in Florence named "Ma noi quando si dorme?" (that can be roughly translated to "But when are we going to sleep?" ) by residents that protest against the noise by customers of bars and similar that talk, laugh, sing, scream, etc. in some streets of the center until well after 2 AM.
It is news of these days that, beginning in May there will be 24 "stewards" on fridays and saturday nights to help "educating" the customers.
The author in the video kind of dismisses EVs saying that at speed there's not much of a difference, but one of the things I definitely noticed when visiting Bergen was how damn quiet the city was because almost everyone was driving EVs. It had a noticeably positive effect on me.
I was very excited about EVs reducing the noise level in my city. Until I realized that most of the noise of a modern car actually comes from the tires. There sin't much difference between a modern non-EV car and an EV, sadly.
At highway speeds there might not be much difference in noise levels, but there's a huge difference on city streets. In cities in with particularly noisy vehicles such as motorcycles, diesel buses, etc, electrification makes a huge difference.
With EVs slowly becoming more dominant in central London (most taxis, and many buses and delivery vans are electric now), I've several times had the slightly eerie (but happy) experience of being at busy intersections and noticing that it was unusually quiet. Then looking around and seeing that every vehicle waiting at the intersection was electric or plug-in hybrid.
> "Of course they have to stop ~20 minutes to recharge instead of just turning back."
London's electric buses (mostly UK-built bus bodies with BYD drivetrains and batteries) have large enough battery packs for them to run all day without charging. They get recharged overnight, when electricity is cheap, while parked in the bus depots.
As of March, London had 785 fully electric buses in service, out of a total fleet of about 9000. The fleet is planned to be fully electric by 2034, which could be brought forward subject to additional funding.
It will be interesting to see if they stick with the overnight-charging model or whether charging while in service will make sense on some routes.
London's hybrid buses are also pretty good for noise (not as good as electric, but a lot better than direct diesel propulsion). No loud bursts of noise when accelerating.
Small?! The majority of London buses are double-deckers, around 11 meters in length with capacities up to 87 passengers (combined seating + standing). Perhaps not the world's largest buses, but I certainly wouldn't call them small!
> "Do you have a source that they run the entire day with no charging?"
Here's an old press release from when they were first introduced: "The buses are equipped with BYD-designed and built Iron-Phosphate batteries, delivering 345 kWh of power ... The batteries can power the bus for over 24 hours and up to 190 miles of typical urban driving on the service routes with a single daily recharging requiring only four hours."
(The reality is that on many central London bus routes, there just isn't anywhere where they could stop for an extended period for recharging. But as more electric buses expand to suburban routes, maybe that will be less of an issue)
London can’t use multi-segment articulated buses (“bendy buses”) due to street size and layout constraints. Basically they’re too long to fit in many places they need to go. They did actually experiment with them on a few routes some years ago, but they were withdrawn after a year or two.
But that doesn’t make London buses small, because they’re double-deckers. Instead of increasing the length, they increase the height.
In any case, bus size is a red herring when it comes to electrification. A larger bus simply gives you more space to install larger batteries, provided you don’t exceed class/axle weight limits etc. Being longer and having more axles, an articulated bus should be even easier to electrify than a double decker!
London has been operating electric buses for almost 10 years now and has a fleet of nearly 800 units. If they weren’t performing to expectations, I’m sure we would have heard about it and they wouldn’t keep buying them!
Look, I've been to London and I've been to Sweden. Your busses are smaller.
Being double decker means nothing when almost nobody wants to bother to go up. But even then. They're still smaller.
> London has been operating electric buses for almost 10 years now and has a fleet of nearly 800 units. If they weren’t performing to expectations, I’m sure we would have heard about it and they wouldn’t keep buying them!
Yes, public administrations are known to run at maximum efficiency and never let any other considerations to decide what to buy.
Like here in sweden they're obviously corrupt when deciding what to buy for public transport.
If one bus means 10 cars and motorcycles stay off the road, the extra loud noise is probably worth it. IMO electric buses are a low priority task for most cities.
Really depends on the speeds. At slower speeds in residential areas the difference is noticeable, especially when cars stop and accelerate again. On larger faster roads not so much.
Indeed, the video says that: the tire noise for ICEs becomes louder than the engine at about 50 kmph. This means that for speeds slower than that, the more important component is the noise of the engine.
That's probably for a constant speed, though. ICE cars are loudest when they are accelerating. On many cars the engine is louder than the tires if you're floor the accelerator no matter what speed.
If you're in the UK, most of the noise comes from "the kids" buying cheap compact cars (Fiat 500s seem popular) and modifying the exhaust to sound like a very, very poor man's Ferrari, or on Sundays, motorbikes.
That, and I've noticed that most diesel exhaust smell seems to come from a small number of vehicles: old VW TDIs, illegally modified taxis, and old buses.
IME you're right, but the cars we hear in a city are the outliers, not a nice modern quiet car. It definitely, in my experience, reduces overall noise to have a lot of electric vehicles.
I wonder if there are low noise tire tread designs? Of course there are probably trade offs. Snow tires are known to be louder than the tires you use in climates that don’t get snow.
Studded snow tires are louder than other tires, snow tires without studs are softer than normal tires so less noise. Modern snow tires without studs are surprisingly good on ice, which is the only place studded tires can compete.
Noise levels is one of the things tires are rated by, but a quiet tire would normally require a softer compound and softer compound wears out faster than harder tires
It's so weird that the 'noise' of petrol cars is considered a safety feature. I've heard from the older generation "Yeah but EVs don't make noise which makes them extremely dangerous. Could easily kill a child or old woman who steps out on to a road because they don't hear a car coming".
It must be the same group of people with their anecdotes about seatbelts and airbags making cars more dangerous.
I'm an EV fan, but lower noise levels makes them more dangerous, not less, at least to the people they can potentially hit (of course for people living next to roads, noise is more hazardous from a more general health point of view). Cars are killer machines and stuff like seatbelts and airbags protect passengers but not pedestrians or cyclists hit by the car. So if you are a pedestrian or cyclist, then having the ability to hear the car is really great.
It's asking the outside people to shoulder the responsibility of avoiding the killer machine. I'd rather have quiet cars and much harsher crackdowns on drivers that use them in ways that jeopardy the lives of others. There are many things drivers can do to reduce the hazard, such as slowing down, buying smaller vehicles, using cars that don't isolate outside noise, only driving when in good mental condition, etc.
It's crazy to me that we allow cars that isolate their cockpit more and more from their surroundings (quiet, small windows, high up from the ground) and instead ask the surroundings to avoid the danger.
I know, ultimately it is each person's own responsibility to avoid death, and it might make sense for the legal system to reflect that. But we don't have these laws with other dangerous things ("it's okay to practise throwing molotov cocktails in public squares, as long as you wear bright clothing so people know to keep their distance"), so cars are sort of an outlier.
> I'd rather have quiet cars and much harsher crackdowns on drivers that use them in ways that jeopardy the lives of others. There are many things drivers can do to reduce the hazard, such as slowing down, buying smaller vehicles, using cars that don't isolate outside noise, only driving when in good mental condition, etc.
I get what you're saying, but IMO, that just wouldn't work well.
If you want a better system, it's better to make as many changes as possible to the system so that problems are impossible and/or unlikely.
Personal responsibility will always have it's place, but it'll never be particularly reliable.
> It's crazy to me that we allow cars that isolate their cockpit more and more from their surroundings (quiet, small windows, high up from the ground) and instead ask the surroundings to avoid the danger.
Being quiet and high aren't issues here. Drivers aren't going to hear pedestrians - not at 30 mph. And I've never been in a vehicle that had windows that I felt affected my awareness, aside from the rear window of the Prius.
> I know, ultimately it is each person's own responsibility to avoid death, and it might make sense for the legal system to reflect that. But we don't have these laws with other dangerous things
Sure, but that's because there's enormous social utility in allowing people to drive cars. If there was a similar utility in letting people throw molotov cocktails, then there'd probably be some sort of dispensation to do just what you suggest.
> If you want a better system, it's better to make as many changes as possible to the system so that problems are impossible and/or unlikely.
I disagree with this premise.
If you want to make a system better, you need to enable as many information flows as possible, shorten feedback loops, etc. The classic Meadows leverage points. The proposal of making cars noisy has the opposite effect, by sweeping problems under the rug.
Just "doing as many things as possible" is a great way to paint oneself into a local optimum.
The flipside of that is that pedestrian deaths are increasing. And I think this is because a lot of them are distracted (many just cross the road while on their phones, and some have over-ear headphones), and some just think "well, the car has to stop, so I'll step out". It's not just car drivers who are at fault - I've had some crazy near-misses with arrogant pedestrians, and sometimes when I've been on my motorbike which is not quiet, and also I would pay quite a price for an accident, even if with a pedestrian or trying to avoid one.
> It's asking the outside people to shoulder the responsibility of avoiding the killer machine.
It's adding a layer of redundancy. The driver needs to pay attention but should that fail, hopefully the car noise will alert the pedestrian, who should also be aware that a car is nearby.
Same logic created the "Loud pipes save lives!" mantra among motorcyclists despite the fact that there's no evidence to support this. By the time a car driver hears the bike it's already too late to avoid an accident.
I ride a bike. I don’t ride a loud bike: it’s still within Australian limits for sale, but it has some volume, and a little bit of lower end thump.
Two bikes before that I rode a 250cc four cylinder bike, that did up to 18,000 RPM. It, again, was within Australian limits, although honestly not by much.
In the middle of those two, I rode a 600cc bike that was significantly quieter than either of those.
My riding remained mostly the same, but one of the three I had significantly more people changing lanes while I was quite literally right beside them.
I don’t believe that ridiculous straight through drag pipes on high displacement twin engines are necessary, but being as loud as another car absolutely saves lives.
Anecdata here - I have had quiet and loud bikes, and the loud ones mean you're much less likely to get 'lane changed' on. Drivers are generally pretty ignorant of what's around them, and it's always the biker that pays the price if there is an accident. I generally don't put myself in harm's way, but there are always times when you have to be in a danger zone. And a loud bike is noticed more, in my experience.
They are right, though. After years of (probably subconscious) conditioning I have a "quiet => safe" condition imprinted very deeply. Especially on smaller streets in quieter neighborhoods.
Precisely (though "walking" is a better word than "jumping"). I need to put in a conscious effort to actually look, especially when I'm lost in thought. (The fact that in some places there is no clear visual distinction between the street and the pavement does not help, either.)
People here tend to walk in middle of the road in smaller one-way streets and move aside when they hear engine noise. More then once I've been startled by electric cars quietly creeping behind me.
> must be the same group of people with their anecdotes about seatbelts and airbags making cars more dangerous.
I don't think it has to be, it is definitely a safety feature that they make a noise, but these people try to justify burning petrol to do this passively "positive" thing
> It's so weird that the 'noise' of petrol cars is considered a safety feature. I've heard from the older generation "Yeah but EVs don't make noise which makes them extremely dangerous.
It's enough of an issue that early Priuses beeped while backing up.
I'm a look both ways kind of person, so I don't really "get" it, but I can also understand that not everyone prioritizes situational awareness.
Having started cycling recently I think people use sound to cross more than you expect. I've had people step into my path multiple times without looking purely because they can't hear me.
In Germany some organizations advocating for visually impaired people (rightfully) complained about this. Apparently the problem is that the „sounds“ EVs play to mimic other vehicles at low speed are too different from other vehicles, and that they stop playing them to early when reaching a certain velocity.
A while ago someone was driving my hybrid car towards me in electric mode. They passed an older lady going in the same direction driving ~10KM/h (6MPH), until the elderly lady made an abrupt 90 degree right turn and walked into the rear door. I guess there is something to say for modern EVs making some kind of artificial zooming noise, though I'm not sure it would have helped this lady as the car was already making noise on the cobblestones.
Not so sure. It might help children but old people are just old and deaf. When they stop in the middle of the path and people ask them politely if they can leave room at normal voice level they typically do not hear it and you end up shooting at them so they can notice you are here trying to pass and move aside.
As a bicyclist, the noise cars make is clearly a safety feature for me. The noise could likely be less and still serve that function adequately, but “silent” cars would be a nightmare.
Yeah. The issue in itself has little merit, because cyclists are also very quiet, even quieter than an EV, and would also send a pedestrian flying on collision.
The issue is negligible with bicycles since they can generally avoid distracted pedestrians unlike cars, and even then they are equipped with bells for that specific purpose.
I don't see how they are different in this case. Pedestrians need to watch out, whether it's a car or a bike, and with bikes, they already learned that they are silent. Cars being more quiet doesn't make them more dangerous then.
You understand you are talking to humans here, right? Actual humans, who perform a lot of actions "on autopilot", without consciously thinking about them, and who may have deeply ingrained habits which are very, very hard to change?
Right, but the problem is, it's unsafe to rely on sound in this manner to begin with, regardless of car noise levels.
Sound can only be used for positive identification - if you can hear a car, it's there. It cannot be used for negative identification - if you can't hear a vehicle, it doesn't mean anything.
This is because there are far too many factors that are at play when it comes to the ability to hear:
- Not every dangerous vehicle makes appreciable sound - an ICE car with its engine off, an EV, a bike, any other small personal transportation device, even a skateboard
- The sound may be masked by another, louder sound
- The sound may seem to come from a different direction, there's no telling how the surrounding environment will reflect the sound around before it's reaches one's ears
- The human crossing may, like you point out, be on autopilot, distracted, or otherwise not perceptive to sound
Because of these, and likely more, factors relying on sound when crossing the street is a horrible idea and will get you killed.
I cannot emphasize this enough, looking both ways when crossing *is mandatory*!
In cities (especially dense, old European cities), IC cars makes most of the noise when they accelerate after a stop at the crossroads, pedestrian crossing etc. EVs or even hybrids make a big difference in such conditions. Not to mention, on a quiet street, even a single IC car passing changes the sound aura of the place completely - whereas, with EVs, you just get a quiet hum.
Yeah EVs are significantly quieter in cities where they're going slowly and tyre noise is relatively low.
Not going to make as much difference if you live near a motorway though since the tyre noise there is really really loud. (I still think it might make some difference though because engines going at 70mph are really loud too.)
I fondly remember the first day of lockdown in my city. No cars, except a handful. Mostly people wandering around on the sideways. It was so quiet that I wish it would've always stayed that way.
> It was so quiet that I wish it would've always stayed that way.
And the smell! It suddenly smelled as if I were in the middle of a small rural town, instead of a major metropolitan area. That's the main reason I'm rooting for EVs to take over; unfortunately, they're still way too expensive.
I worked in a downtown area for 3 years and used to walk around there quite a bit.
I think trucks are 10 times louder than cars. I walk by 20 cars idling at a stop light and 20 cars driving in the other direction. The noise doesn't bother me. The car exhaust doesn't bother me either.
I stand next to one diesel truck idling and the noise is really loud and the exhaust makes me cough.
If I could make any changes I would get rid of diesel trucks first.
The only time I hear a honk in my home country of Finland is when someone's asleep at the wheel when the light goes green, or a drunken pedestrian stumbles in front of a bus.
When visiting Alicante, Spain, I couldn't believe the constant honking all around the city. I caught an ambulance on video, sirens blazing, stuck in a roundabout for like 10 minutes right outside a hospital. Something about the driving culture just seems so wildly disorganized and impolite to me.
Fire/ambulance/police are supposed to be exceptionally loud so they can get drivers attention and then they can get through. (I expect you know this already, but I'm making sure we're all on the same page.)
Over time cabins in vehicles have gotten more isolated with better sound systems. Outside has gotten generally louder. Both of these things mean the emergency sirens need to be even louder for it to get a drivers attention.
I'm not sure if it is because drivers don't hear/see them or if they just don't care anymore, but almost every time I see a firetruck with it's lights and sirens on lately, I see it have to come to a stop and wait, get on the even louder horn, before drivers start getting out of its way. This isn't down the whole length of the street or anything, just once or twice before it drives out of my view (several blocks). I don't think I ever saw in person this before 10 years ago.
The problem is that horns and sirens typically provide little practical benefit. Even in an emergency situation like a heart attack, arriving an extra minute or two faster rarely improves patient outcomes. Essentially, these noises are put on for show.
A horn, when heard as a pedestrian, is extremely loud, but it's not that loud to the driver using the horn, or to other drivers, since they are shielded by their vehicles. If the horn were as loud inside the vehicle (or close to it) as it is outside of the vehicle, then drivers might be dissuaded from using the horn frivolously. A regulation could be enacted that mandates that the horn's volume inside the car be closer to the volume of the horn when heard outside of the car.
Honking is basically the only real way drivers have to communicate with the world outside their car. When a honk is needed to say anything you have to use it for everything.
(The contrast is particularly stark against e.g. cycling where you can just match pace with a stranger and hold a brief conversation about whatever happened.)
Honking is about drivers releasing their frustration and nothing else.
For one thing, everyone in other cars have their ACs and music on and cannot hear the honking anyways. So you’re not communicating with them anyways. And if you’re honking at pedestrians in a first world country you’re driving wrong.
I think I can count on two hands the amount of times I've used my horn in 20 years of driving.
It's used for when I think someone hasn't seen me (ie. reversing), or if the lights have turned green and the person isn't paying attention. The latter will be a bump on the horn (so about 100ms) where I doubt it gets up to full volume.
People are quite happy to wind down the window in order to show their displeasure with a hand gesture where I live.
Like mentioned in the video Moppets are annoyingly loud. They are allowed on many of the bicycle paths (and go on the once they're not supposed to anyway). So if a city center diverges car traffic but has a bicycle path through it they ruin the otherwise calm.
In my personal opinion they are not suited for bicycle paths at all. And don't get me started on 'brommobielen' (tiny cars that can go max. 45 km/h and you can drive with just a scooter license). Those things annoy the heck out of me. They either drive you off the bicycle path because they are just cars and should be on the road, or, they clog up the roads because they are not cars and shouldn't be on the road. Dutch infrastructure is just not made for them.
When I visited Copenhagen a few years ago, the first thing I noticed was how quiet it was. It was still bustling with life, but with so few cars, I was quite shocked at the noise level.
I recently moved from a forested mountain to the center if a very small city. Even though there is a freeway 1/2 mile away road noise isn't bad as this area still has significant WFH %.
It did take me 6 months to adapt to the very frequent emergency sirens, mostly fire/ambulance. It was jarring at first but now I've mostly tuned that out.
Then there's garbage trucks with their very loud backup beeps several mornings per week, and construction noise that starts every morning at 5am.
The worst are people who double honk every time they go around a corner in a parking garage, even at 11pm. That's not really a thing in this area so I'm assuming they learned that habit elsewhere.
I think I remember reading some studies about noise pollution back when I was studying psychology. Anxiety and stress is consistently higher among people that live near high noise pollution, even though they don’t complain about the noise, or even claim to notice it any more than people living in low noise environments.
In short, even though you got used to the noise, your brain didn’t.
Life/partner changes required switching from owning a home to renting an apartment, at least for now. I have a strong preference for high altitude/views so ended up in a high-rise apartment.
The subway. Ambulances. Construction. Garbage truck compactors. Guys trying to get you into their restaurants. Panhandlers. Buskers. Customers haggling with street vendors. Hassidim on cellphones negotiating deals. Mothers on cellphones giving relationship advice. Laughing teenagers. Drunken couples having fights. Cops chit chatting with each other, or arresting people.
People have recorded the sounds of NYC and during the pandemic someone posted this to YouTube for nostalgia.
I've traveled to 35+ cities and they're all quiet compared with New York.
The worst part is that horns and sirens often little practical use. Even in an emergency situation like a heart attack, an extra minute or two rarely improves patient outcomes. Essentially, these noises are put on for show.
One reason this is a problem is that a road isn't a point source of noise, it's a line source. So the noise decreases only linearly with distance, not as the square.
Eh, there are myriad other variables that correlate to high noise environments that I suspect are far more causally connected to the negative health effects that this video attributes to noise alone. Sloppy.
Yeah usually the space right outside of train stations is loud because the train station is made to be reachable via all the means the city provides: car, bicycle, bus, tram, taxi, etc. Train stations are usually the mobility hub of a city and this brings noise with it.
I visited Boston from the UK last year and was struck by the lower level of traffic noise. I attributed it to there being far fewer diesel cars and more EVs & hybrids. In the UK we have diesel powered buses and taxis everywhere as well as lots of personal cars, and the engines all have a much deeper and louder rumble than petrol engines.
Cars are a fairly constant and relatively low-level background noise, except for boy racers with intentionally-loud exhausts and revving aggressively, or anyone honking angrily.
Trucks and buses going over speed bumps, now that's much more annoying road noise (when there's a speed bump on a moderately busy road just outside your bedroom window)
Frequent emergency sirens and car alarms, they're pretty loud and sleep-interrupting.
Intoxicated groups of people making their way home at 2am can seen very loud too, in the worst way (yelling/arguing/singing badly)
> Trucks and buses going over speed bumps, now that's much more annoying road noise (when there's a speed bump on a moderately busy road just outside your bedroom window)
This gives me nightmares about my last apartment. Not even the same situation, but the specific nature of this reminds me that you don't even know what's going to be a bad situation until it happens. I lived next to a road that did not appear to be busy and had a 35 mph speed limit when visiting. That road turned into a major artery for people going to and from work during morning and afternoon rush hour, with most drivers going closer to 45 - 50 mph. My window didn't even face the road, but the constant doppler shift sounds of the cars echoed down the alleyway into my bedroom window. I started to hate that sound.
Pedestrians also crossed that street frequently, and I'd occasionally hear car crashes if I was working from home. It always happened from someone stopping short to avoid killing a pedestrian, and the car behind that car rearending it.
I thought I'd learned my lesson after living directly on a busy street. That was even worse. People would constantly honk in the right lane because the car at the front of that lane would be turning right, but might have to wait for a pedestrian. It was infuriating. They're several cars back in the right lane and can't see what's going on so they have to assume the person at the front of the lane must be asleep at the wheel, so they honk. I wanted to get out there are inflict corporal punishment on anyone who honked.
Living on a major bird migratory path sometimes makes me miss the quiet of the city. Tourists from the big cities actually complain about how loud it gets, they love it the first night but after a few days of getting woken up at 4AM by the dawn's chorus they start getting irritable. The blue jays showed up this week and they get the crows and seagulls going which really makes a racket. Noise is relative and what you are used too but I would not miss car noise.
Living in Tokyo, I found the most constantly intrusive noise to be the deliberate noise-makers at stations and crossings. Less frequent but even more annoying because they intruded into areas supposed to be quieter were the PA systems mounted on trucks. Traffic rumble was always there but for me it was ignorable away from the major thoroughfares.
The level of noise is the predominant parameter in my selection for a living place. I always consult the noise map[0] before moving anywhere in Vienna/AT. I hope other governments offer the same information.
There's a jackhammer and other construction noise across the street this morning that woke me up at 7 AM.
Yes, cities are loud.
Construction is loud, sirens are loud, leaf blowers are loud, lawn mowers are loud, dogs are loud, gunshots are loud, airplanes are loud, helicopters are loud, parties are loud, trains are loud, HVAC is loud.
The paradox for me is that my noise experience has been inversely correlated to the environment for decades: the more rural, the more noise; the more urban, the less noise. Looked at another way: noise was inversely correlated to walk score, the higher the score the lower the noise, the lower the score the higher the noise. Intuitively that makes sense since we can infer that walk score means all else being equal, more people are in quiet transit options.
Suburban has been between the two extremes, but the noise leans toward the rural end of the spectrum, though Harleys aren't the cause, car dependence and lack of transit options are as predictable from the walk score.
Reasons are easy to state: Harleys and the quiet but unusual confines of a single floor flat in the city (at least in the United States).
Living in Hong Kong, I'll tell you what's loud: the constant remodelling, both in apartment and office buildings. Try working in an office where someone is trying to drill 50 holes into a concrete wall next door.
In comparison, all other noises can be easily ignored.
If anyone doesn't think cities are loud, they came come to my neighborhood at anytime. Between the bars, the "lounges" and just loud people in general.
In certain parts of NYC people just blast music from large speakers to small Bluetooth devices, even on public transportation.
Here is the 311 data for noise complaints and see how many are not car related.
New York actually is incredibly loud, I found it tough getting used to the hum of every air-conditioner in a hundred mile radius at night and I spent my first years on an air-force base.
My experience in Brazil and Uruguay is that since the 80s, cars have become much much quieter and also people don't honk as much.
In Uruguay, especially, the bus fleet was awful in the 80s and 90s. They were very old, made a lot of noise, and polluted like hell. There are many electric buses nowadays and the old Leylands are gone.
You don't see electric buses in Brazil and most of the noise comes from diesel buses and the small ones are the worst (I think this is regulatory failure, not a technical issue).
In a recent worrying sign that I’m turning into a grumpy old man, I got on a bus and was instinctively annoyed that it glided away more or less silently (it was a plug-in hybrid in battery mode). Double decker buses are _supposed_ to be noisy, damnit! (Back in the day they sounded like they were constantly about to explode, particularly if faced with even a minor hill; even pure diesel examples are a lot quieter these days…)
The most annoying thing are the buses. The cars are just ambient noise to me, but every 15 minutes I hear a loud vrooooom, and their exhausts are so disgusting.
Mopeds are also really loud, I hate them so much. It's a shame that the engine noise isn't dampened somehow, because otherwise they work very well in city traffic.
I used to live on the 8th floor of a highrise with a medium sized arterial road below. Car engines are annoying, but far, far worse was when it rained, the sound of cars plowing through puddles. Being the rainy PNW, this sound was ever-present and very annoying. EVs might solve the car engine problem but I don't see them solving the puddle problem.
It's not wrong to blame vehicles for the bulk of the noise pollution. Vehicles are certainly louder than people and pets.
But people are loud too. I live in a suburb and even it is unbearably loud. Neighbours talking outside next door. Dogs barking. Car doors opening and shutting. People playing loud music. Emergency vehicle sirens. Little kids playing or screaming.
The point is, more people = more noise and therefore yes cities are loud necessarily.
As someone with pretty severe misophionia, I can't wait to go rural. Even then the sound of chirping birds will still annoy me but at least I can remove the majority of people created noise from the equation.
Edit: In 2018/19 lived temporarily in a condo for a right downtown in Toronto's Entertainment District. It was pretty good at filtering the noise when the doors and windows were shut. But when the Raptor's were in the NBA playoffs crowds flooded the streets and you could hear their chants and cheers inside the condo even with everything closed. It was a nightmare and very much "people being loud."
i mentally surrendered to most car noise and consider it just background humming. what i didn't surrender to is cars and motorcycles designed or tuned to make as much noise as possible. that's also what sticks out like hell.
This is the second reason why I am in favor of electric vehicles. The first being that pollution creation will happen somewhere else instead of inside the community where I live.
Author early in the video said Karachi, Pakistan can be over 140db during peak hour traffic. I expect India's population hot spots to be similar or worse. I understand how it arrived there, hopefully something can be done to address it.
Discussing a topic rationally and openly isn't a bias, and I've seen no evidence that HN has an anti-car bias particularly.
We dedicate a huge amount of the public space to personal vehicles, and it is the sort of solution that basically creates its own problem, with the uptake of cars necessitating urban planning that make it necessary for an uptake in cars. Rinse and repeat.
It should be possible to discuss this rationally. I see cars as having tremendous faults, yet I own two of them.
I think the blind spot and empath gap gp is referring to is the attitude of the anti-car crowd. I had this just yesterday in another thread. The attitude of many city folks toward suburbanites is basically "have you considered radically changing your lifestyle, abandoning most of your existing habits and hobbies, and petition your town to put in bike infra where zero room to do so exists?"
They fail to realize that huge swaths of America is pretty much permanently stuck with pedestrian-unfriendly infrastructure.
I’d also add the enormous expense: if you’re rich, sure, cars aren’t a concern but even middle class people are usually worried about payments & repairs, and loss of a reliable car is one of the most common ways people fall out of the middle class, not to mention everyone starting retirement with so much less money.
There are good parts, of course, but I think it’s very reasonable to ask whether we get a good value from something we collectively give up so much for.
Wouldn't really call it middle class if a lower five digit sum is a major inconvenience. Probably the problem is more that there is not much middle class left nowadays and most people are lower class.
The American median income is around $45-50k so pretty much by definition any 5 digit expense is a big deal for the middle class. More importantly, however, you have to look at the amount of money people have leftover for unexpected expenses – a ton of people are living close to paycheck to paycheck even if they have median or better household income. They’re middle class by any common definition but fragile.
That sounds more like "petite bourgeoisie" than actual middle class. I know there was a lot of effort to redefine the term, but imo median income has little to do with it. If you live paycheck to paycheck you aren't even petite bourgeoisie.
No idea why you think median income has any relevance here. You could of course define "middle class" like that, but that is not the actual meaning of the term. I think in Western societies your middle class is at best 10% of people nowadays.
And just to add: I think this widespread redefinition of what middle class is not an accident. It seems quite effective, if you think 50k USD is middle class in the US. It wouldn't even be middle class in most of poorer Europe. The idea of term is completely unrelated to relative income, but rather a different social status; that isn't the case if you live paycheck to paycheck. And this redefinition is happening to obscure the fact that a large part of our population in the West had a loss in living standards over the last decades.
Looking from anywhere else in the world - how car-centric USA is - is fucking insane. Minor regional differences doesn't matter, you're still out there in the top right corner, category of your own.
BTW one of the result of this is that somehow Americans think only people living in big cities don't like cars. Like WTF? What does one have to do with the other?
That's not true at all. Tons of places outside the USA love cars and have a car centered transportation system. If anything it's a European biais to assume otherwise
Even if towns had the infra money and political will (they usually don't), where's all this hypothetical infrastructure gonna go? Where I live, there's a main drag which is the ideal location for pedestrian infra, has all the shops, near the one (1) bus route we have. No sidewalks. No room to even put one in, without some massive eminent domain. Literally there are buildings in the way which would prevent any expansion.
cars go on it like 30 km/h cause it's so narrow. No need for any infrastructure.
If the road is wide enough for cars to go faster - it's wide enough to fit pavement (one side at least). Pavement can be very narrow too - 1 m is infinitely better than no pavement. I've even seen 0.5 m pavements but that's stretching it :)
If the road is so narrow you can't fit pavement there - it's probably safe already.
But I've seen roads in USA and I think you just have no comparison on what "no space" means.
Look, having to commute to work sucks. This isnt an empathy gap, or if it is maybe in the other direction. Commuting half an hour or more to your retail job due to essentially zoning laws isn't great, and it could be made better.
This is the one that gets me. It would be trivial to regulate, and the inspections already happen. But no, straight pipe hot rod bikes are somehow a human necessity.
Got to get laid… women are attracted by loud noises.
I hate it when I go hiking in a nature park and there comes (illegally) people to ride bikes and quads on the trails. But even on the road, I hear those damn motorcycle's engines for tens of km in that silence.
I remember one summer hearing a particularly annoying instance, that then stopped, and after a while an helicopter. We presumed he had gone into a ditch. Found out later that it was exactly what happened.
At least where I am (BC) emissions are regulated, so straight piped cars and bikes are already illegal. The issue is that there are no mandatory inspections for non-commercial vehicles, so if you don’t get pulled over you’re never going to get stopped.
It almost certainly is regulated but not enforced, just like having car windows tinted like Darth Vader’s helmet. Motor vehicles are fascinating that way because so many people have bought into the manufacturer’s “wheels = freedom” marketing that even people who are otherwise very law-and-order resist most attempts at accountability. That’s especially true for motorcycles since they’re so popular with off-duty police.
Yup, the bigger tyres makes a noise difference at speed, it's more energy efficient because of this. You'll notice a sound difference between good and bad tyres too.
This didn't happen in the places where I lived back in Europe because zoning laws were different. Instead of the sprawl of freehold single family homes separate from a dense urban core, these much quieter towns had a preponderance of moderate-density areas with mixed use buildings. This means people can live within walking distance to where they work and where they shop, so they do just that: walk through quiet streets, often surrounded with trees. This moderate density also translates into frequent and fast public transit.
Overall it is a much more pleasant day-to-day living experience. And it is not unique to Europe, you can get the same experience in Japan, for example. I hope we can learn from them.