I think of ambient silence as the most valuable sound of all. Think about what it'd cost you to get freedom from your neighbor's lawnmower, traffic, sirens, construction, dogs barking, and the rest of the mindless noise that involuntarily assaults the average person's brain all day. You might think you can move out to the country, but most of the homes you might buy still have plenty of it. Neighbors will have bigger lawns that require even louder diesel tractors to mow, large dog ownership is at a higher ratio, recreational gunfire is more common, or you might hear a chainsaw running all day. In fact, it might be even more noticeable due to its irregularity.
I hope the future is a quieter place. Electric motors replacing internal combustion engines is a step in the right direction. I suspect we'll need a full cultural shift and actual noise ordinance enforcement to get there though. Otherwise, it only takes one guy with $100 buying a leaf blower to ruin everyone's day.
With modern (unmodified) cars a lot of the time tyre noise is actually more significant than engine noise, so a switch to electric by itself won't do it.
It depends, rolling noise is more important at high speed, but engine noise is more important at slow speeds. If you are next to a highway, it probably won't make a difference, but if you live in a city with a lot of slow traffic, it will.
Also, mopeds, even unmodified ones are way too loud, especially for the speed they are going.
30 km/h is the maximum speed allowed in many cities (and a growing number of them) and even in cities where 50 km/h is allowed, the average speed is apparently around 30 km/h when traffic is minimal (in France, according to [0]) and 15 km/h otherwise. I think it's safe to say that electric cars reduce noise in cities, in fact I can observe it every day myself from my house.
That's why electric cars are required to emit an artificial noise when driving under 30 km/h to alert the visually impaired pedestrians. The Renault Zoe car makes a very strange noise, almost like an alien flying saucer from a 60s movie.
I understand the need for these noisemakers, having been startled a few times by electric cars moving at walking speeds as without a noisemaker, they are effectively silent.
But these weird spaceship noises, I hate them, and for some reason, dogs seem the hate them too. So unnatural. I much prefer more typical noise like white noise, like a fan running. I think that studies have shown that white noise is particularly good for that purpose as the source can be located easily.
Anecdotally, I live in a large apartment building in car-centric Southern California, and individual cars driving into the parking garage outside my window don’t disturb me (I like to sleep with the windows open). It’s the larger work vehicles that are the problem. The engines in big trucks (moving vans, trash trucks, construction equipment) are not tuned how personal autos are, for a variety of reasons.
For sure it's different with trucks. Sometimes that works in your favour, like when it's bin day and you forgot to take the bins out last night.
In general though I don't really know enough to know why they can't make commercial vehicles quieter. In my experience at least city buses manage to be relatively quiet.
I'm impressed that your buses are quiet. In SF, the city buses rattle my entire house when they pass by a half-block away. It's more "vibration" than "noise", but the whole house shakes and I hear clattering of little unbalanced objects in the cabinets and so on. In the last 5 years I've never experienced an earthquake that shook my house any more than the buses that pass by every 10 minutes.
I live in the southern US and these things with modified exhausts are everywhere. There's no car inspection and no regulations are enforced. You can hear them at all hours of the day even if you live several blocks from a major road.
This is often repeated here, but from where I’m sitting it self evidently isn’t true. I wonder if it could be because in the US there are so many automatic transmissions, and hearing high revs is relatively rare.. but most cars here are manual and high revs (in traffic) is common place
You didn't specify a speed, so I'm curious how fast are your suburban back roads? I've seen signs from the US that show 40mph speed limits on purely residential back streets which is already faster than I can drive on literally any street within my city.
Residential roads here are max 30km/h (18mph) but also often 20km/h (12mph). Slow enough that the EVs should produce less noise, even though both produce tire noise.
Rural living can be noisier than the suburbs. It depends on density, agriculture type, presence of commercial activity, etc. Where noise ordinances exist, they are generally more lenient outside city limits. In the USA, getting action against a noise nuisance is extremely difficult.
The quietest living experience I've had over the past decade has been a modern high-rise apartment in Korea. Between-unit noise insulation is good. If you are in a low-traffic area and high enough to be away from incidental street noise, you can have true silence most of the time. The only real threat to your peace is if you get clog dancers living above you.
Yeah, newer build city building in SF is much quieter than Palo Alto.
The constant lawn equipment in suburbia make them incredibly loud. Gas leaf blowers are banned but it doesn’t matter, they’re used anyway along with hedge trimmers. They are basically going at all daylight hours, it was one of the surprising perks of moving to the city - much quieter.
Yep. The country seems nice and quiet until your neighbor decides to have a drunken ATV party with music. (This is, unfortunately, not a theoretical occurrence for me).
I've lived in both the city and the sticks and I can tell you that out in the sticks, you don't hear your neighbor's tractor. In general the ambient noise is far, far less and on many days idyllic. In my case the most egregious sound was the morning braying of the neighbor's donkey, which never lasted long.
In my case, I live in the sticks and I heard my neighbor's tractor all day today. It's not all that often I do, but believe me when he's working the fields the machine is very audible. I don't mind it much- he's being productive and that's great (and as I write this, he's wrapped up for the day and I'm listening to a wood thrush and the sound of the creek as it runs over the rocks, both of which are very soothing). The one noise that's deeply annoying here carries much further than any tractor- it's the yokels and their seemingly unlimited supply of ammo.
Maybe you can't hear the tractor but that doesn't stop you from hearing cars on the racetrack well over 20 miles away. There are plenty of noises to be heard
Two summers ago I spent some time at the Grand Canyon in the middle of the night, and you could hear a pin drop a hundred miles away. It was so silent I felt like I was in a vacuum, like sound was being sucked out of me. We could hear any car in the area for miles and miles.
The insane part was when my friend looked up and noticed a vanishingly small red sliver in the sky, and the moment he said "Is that the moon?" just about every coyote in the state of Arizona lit up at once in a cacophony of lunar worship. You could hear each single coyote, each pack (similar vocalizations among group members) and even some random guy's dog joining in the fun. It was electrifying, my hair stood straight up.
On the other hand, I found my former situation with the Swiss regulations around noise, including mandated, legally-backed, police-enforced quiet from 12:00-13:00, 22:00-07:00 M-Sa and the entirety of Sunday a source of continual angst. (Of course, the church bells which bang every 15 minutes 7x24 are exempted from these strictures.)
On balance, I think I'd rather take the risk of having a neighbor running a chainsaw any time he wants over getting a knock from the cops because some busybody decided hoovering up broken glass on a Sunday afternoon was sufficiently verboten to necessitate involving the authorities.
But was it quiet in Switzerland? I read a lot about the poor quality of their apartment blocks, to the extent that one could hear their neighbours just talking.
The old buildings have the usual old building problems, including hearing when your upstairs neighbor has gas or is feeling amorous. The newer concrete ones are much better, but entirely devoid of character. If you have millions, you can buy 49% of a house and get away from it all.
On balance, my experience of Switzerland was not particularly quiet, but then I mostly worked in urbia and lived in suburbia. The mountains are lovely and still, but there's not much tech work going in the forest.
We already have noise ordinances but police don’t enforce them.
It is really hard to prove a person was making a noise I guess. Maybe with the right motivation they could just make certain vehicle modifications entirely illegal. Loud cars and leaf blowers are the bane of my existence.
For vehicles, at least in France, the law says how the noise should be measured, and it doesn't seem that complicated. But, in practice, it's basically never enforced.
Recently, they've started deploying a few "noise radars". I don't know how well they work, since I haven't seen much talk about those since the initial announcement.
I recently moved to a more rural place (which in my coutry means: The neighbours are at least 20 meters away in separated houses instead of 5 and the houses are attached to each other), I though it would be more quiet but indeed: No.
In the city people listened to music in their yard, but here, people have leaf blowers, big lawnmowers, large dogs, large heat pumps (for home and pool), roasters, complete bars in their yard, there are festivals in summer that push sound for kilometers over the acres.
Strange thing is, I hate the music and the leaf blowers, don’t mind the dogs or screaming kids at all. Also, when busy I don’t notice the sounds, but then the moment comes where I listen intently and get very annoyed. So I feel the answer to my peaceful life must be in me. I must be like Seneca, accept how it is. I won’t move yet again and my wife does not want to live in the middle of nowhere, just so that all I hear is birds.
I wish I was more like the people that just blow leaves for 5 hours a day and don’t care. I guess for some, noise really is no problem.
The quietest place I've ever experienced is out on the ocean, after a calm, anchored on the great Bahamas bank. A stillness came over us as we shut the engine off and listened to the vast nothing.
This has happened to two friends of mine (in the UK).
One moved out to somewhere on the country and of suburban, only to find out that his neighbour was running a firewood selling business on the side. So saws going for at least several hours each day.
Another moved somewhere very much in the country. Then the owner of the field next door decided to rent it out to dirtbike racers. So every weekend they have to deal with tons of noise and clouds of dust for ~6-8 hours.
Ditch the fossil-powered lawn mower. Get a robotic electric one. And reduce your trimmed lawn area so that there is more wild meadow-like area for insects.
I hope the future is a quieter place. Electric motors replacing internal combustion engines is a step in the right direction. I suspect we'll need a full cultural shift and actual noise ordinance enforcement to get there though. Otherwise, it only takes one guy with $100 buying a leaf blower to ruin everyone's day.