Unfortunately electric cars won't solve the noise problem. The graph on http://www.leiserstrassenverkehr.bayern.de/laerm/entstehung/ (a German government website) compares the engine noise ("Antriebsgeräusch") with the tire noise ("Rollgeräusch") for different speeds ("Gesamtgeräusch" means "total noise"). The yellow line is for trucks, the blue lines for cars.
As you can see at a speed of 40 kph (25 mph) a car's tire noise is already higher than the engine noise and at even higher speed the engine noise doesn't really matter anymore. So even if your electric car engine is absolute silent, the total noise at speeds above 30 mph won't be all that different.
The only real solution is electric cars plus significantly reduced speed limits.
That must only be comparing standard passenger sedans. I live at the intersection of a busy street and your typical motorized car is barely audible through the window. Cars are not the problem.
The vehicles that shake the apartment are pickup trucks (low rumble), sport cars (high pitched tear), transport trucks (big rumble), and motorcycles (little explosions that set off car alarms). Electric container trucks would be a huge win for ambient noise.
I also live close to a very busy intersection and I have to agree with you. I'll add though that when you leave your window open then general car noise definitely becomes a problem, and also wanted to add that I for myself would ban honking, it's one of the worst feelings in the world to be woken up at 8 in the morning by guys or ladies honking their car for 5 seconds or more.
I'm also living at such a busy street. It's a big difference compared to a house in a quiet street without any traffic.
Keeping the window open during night is a huge problem now. In my old home I did that always, now I have to fight against the heat in the rooms or the noise.
Also looking a movie with open windows is not much fun. The cars stop at the traffic lights, the engines start crying when the light turns green and I missed part of a dialog...
That beeing said, choose your home carefully. Especially when you lived before in a quiet neighborhood.
I lived in an intersection like you and now I have lots of health issues and I'm extra sensitive to smog..it makes life much harder and shortens life-span. All I can say is that it's not worth to live in a place like that...move somewhere else if you can
Yellow lines are trucks and blue lines are cars. The graph actually shows that until around 60 km/h it's mostly the motor noise that's a problem with trucks.
That analysis is missing a important factors. Engine output varies greatly, and they get a lot louder when the vehicle is accelerating hard or going up a hill. And average noise is not very important, peak noise is far more so.
I don't doubt that tire noise dominates on average, but engine noise from big trucks is far louder at peak. At least for the roads near my house, typical traffic is a steady ignorable hum, but when big trucks go by uphill or start moving from a stoplight, they make so much noise I can barely hear myself think.
Cars are similar, usually much smaller in magnitude. Every so often you get some silly person who thinks a bad muffler makes his car fast and compete with the big trucks.
Electrification may not bring down average noise levels much, but it'll still make it a lot more pleasant to be near a busy road.
Engines have a different sound profile that makes comparing the sounds produced a little more complex. Further, on a highway the worst offenders have much worse engine noise than average.
Concrete is the worst, you can hear the roar from concrete road miles away.
Porous tarmac is much quieter and much safer, in S Wales UK I remember vividly a trial many years ago on a section of the M4.
In very heavy rain, on the normal tarmac - much standing water, aquaplaning risk, low visibility, huge spray, then onto the porous section - zero spray, no standing water, was amazing like night and day.
They never implemented though, double the cost, so not worth the many lives it would save!
Almost all roads in the Netherlands are made with the porous tarmac, it solves many problems, but it will not last as long as the non porous variant and is indeed more expensive...
Thanks for sharing this graph! I've often wondered about tire vs. engine noise, and this answers all my questions in one succinct graph.
From my point of view, this data makes me optimistic, because I'm most bothered by noise when I'm walking beside the road on city streets, which are below 50km/h, and the graph promises a noticeable improvement in that area.
Doesn't the graph on that site show that electric trucks would be a huge win for lower noise in the city? I would be interested in the standard deviations of these line plots, because I would guess that the engine noise varies much more depending on the acceleration of the truck. I am not that much annoyed by a truck driving with constant speed, but much more annoyed by a truck which is heavily accelerating. And maybe 9 out of 10 trucks passing by are just driving with constant speed but the 10th will be the one which is annoying because it is accelerating.
Electric scooters are almost completely silent (at 40km/h). So I'd say there's a lot of potential for lower noise tires. I guess at the moment there's just no optimization towards low noise profile. And I assume it'll be with trade-offs.
On wet streets the noise from the tires is also a lot louder. Another thing we're completely used to. But once you pay attention to this, you realize just how much louder it actually is.
Electric scooters have a much smaller tire surface area, which is probably a big part of it. Wet roads, too, caused by that -- more area to slap water.
I don't even hear the tires on the little Google Pods they're driving around Mountain View these days, which seems to have little bitty tires like a smart (wise for efficiency), but the drive is quite audible. As an aside, it's oddly futuristic, though; I think they did that on purpose because when it goes by I get confused and think I'm in Star Trek for a minute. It genuinely sounds like background foley in Hollywood future movies, and I'm not sure I really mind it.
I'd laugh if Google put all this money and time into self-driving cars, a big executive-involved project at a behemoth, and in the end the engineers gave it the Star Trek background-whirr noise on purpose.
I live in the country and my house is about 100-feet off a rural highway with a 65-mph speed limit. Being Texas, most folks are going a bit faster.
One of my neighbors has a Tesla. It's no quieter at these speeds than the numerous diesel pickups that inhabit these parts -- the tire noise is amazingly loud. Luckily this road isn't very heavily traveled or I'd be tempted to build a berm or other noise abatement obstruction.
Or better engineering for the tires, emphasizing also their sound profiles. Tire tech has advanced a lot in the past 20 years, I imagine that adding another coordinate for optimization would be doable, albeit hard.
>>The only real solution is electric cars plus significantly reduced speed limits.
Which isn't a solution as it would be like saying "the only real solution is no automobile (cars/vehicles)", because people will want ever more speeds.
So I guess, we must look for other better solutions. Somewhere I read that some chemistry researchers (AFAIK at Purdue university) are trying to improve the road building material/tyre surface material such that the noise caused by the impact of tyres on the roads is reduced. They claim that the noise caused by the impact of the speeding tyres on the road-surface is a very large noise cause.
there were some experiments years ago that don't seem to have gone anywhere because of costs, where old tires were ground up and added into the asphalt for new roads - at a HUGE difference.
I think no one has really been making an effort in this area lately, but doesn't make it impossible.
I don't know german, does that account for road type? I know the tire noise in my car is freaking horrible on the lousy plain concrete highway, but drops off nicely as soon as I hit any nicer material.
Why boo? Reduced speed maps to vastly reduced pedestrian death and injury, encourages increased bicycle road share, and allows reduced lane sizes which increases the usable land in urban environments.
The speeds in the article are in km/h, not miles/h. Residential zones in Germany are 30 km/h, larger inner-city roads are usually 50 km/h, so this very much applies to cities too.
So what was that thing about wanting to add artificial noise to electric cars for safety reasons because you normally can't hear them coming? Was that just bogus stuff from someone?
As you can see at a speed of 40 kph (25 mph) a car's tire noise is already higher than the engine noise and at even higher speed the engine noise doesn't really matter anymore. So even if your electric car engine is absolute silent, the total noise at speeds above 30 mph won't be all that different.
The only real solution is electric cars plus significantly reduced speed limits.