One egregiously loud motorcycle rolling through manhattan can be a nuisance to literally millions of people. This is unreasonable and a ticketing system like this makes a ton of sense.
Police enforcement could probably solve the issue just as effectively. Cops ignore loud honking and loud cars when its right in front of them. If they would just stop ignoring such things the frequency would surely go down as well.
Good. I look forward to this enforcement in my city. I currently live against a major road. During the night, the traffic noise isn’t disturbing, except for about one vehicle in a thousand. And that motorcycle wakes me at 3am. For weeks on end. My neighbor’s kid’s motorcycle. On his way to work at 3am, has to gun it when turning out of the neighborhood, waking everyone. These are neighbors who had shot their next door neighbor’s cat, so unlikely to adapt their actions based upon my request. I’d happily pay for this device for my town. And yes, I’ve investigated soundproofing my bedroom. Quote was around $16k. Multiply that by the dozens of neighbors he wakes each night, and he forces everyone else to bare hundreds of thousands of dollars in upgrades so he can make noise at 3am. As much as I don’t want to step on anyone’s “freedoms”, noise sucks.
We have a similar problem. Replace "motorcycle" with "bro-dozer" and make it 4am.
Noise sucks. And since the pandemic lockdowns have lifted, it's even more abrasive. Those few months of relative quiet were marvelous. Where I live, it's a lot of tire noise from a highway over a mile away - just a constant background "brrrrrr" that I didn't notice before and can't ignore today.
Similar deal here. Some asshole at my apartment got an expensive new car that literally the entire building (with god knows how many units, it's big) hears every single time he enters or leaves. He revs his engine twice on every single floor of the parking garage and all along the street I'm situated on. He'll even do it for hours on end (he did on Monday!). I honestly think he's trying to harass someone in particular because it's obscene at this point.
Literally one person. Always the same car. I am so sick of this shit. Management is sick of it but "can't do anything." I have yet to meet a neighbor who is not aware of this problem and sick of it.
I'm honestly amazed at the audacity of these people.
Historically, people just left for more rural parts rather than try and change behavior.
I know your scenario is particularly egregious, but there’s other stories in this thread that make me wonder how someone can live in Manhattan or along an interstate highway and still complain about noise.
Well if they go to work at 3am, that probably means they’re asleep earlier in the day. All you gotta do is blast music at that time until they get the message.
For extra fun, automate it to start playing music as early as you can to match their sleep schedule, even when you’re out of the house. Say that it’s to warm up your speakers for when you get home.
> These are neighbors who had shot their next door neighbor’s cat
Jesus. At that point I'd go up to questionably legal methods to get these fuckers some justice. People who intentionally murder cats deserve everything that's coming for them.
they killed a neighbor's pet, but were they punished by the law? that's insane. and it also should significantly lower the threshold to having them in trouble as assholes again.
Tangent: We should outlaw leaf blowers in cities while at it. It's february and freezing out and for some reason the idiotic management in the apartment across the street has contracted some crew to do daily leaf blowers on nearly completely clean sidewalks disturbing probably hundreds of people WFH. Not to even mention how particularly awful leaf blowers are for the environment.
The vast majority of motorcyles in America are illegally modified to be louder than they should [0]. This crime is basically impossuble to police because you need an offer with a reliable sound meter device in the right place at the right time. I am glad NY is going to automate this.
I used to live on a street (Guerrero St in SF) that had loud motorcycles ripping down in the middle of the night on a daily basis. Every time this happens I am sure multiple people wake up, causing loss of sleep and therefore loss of happiness and productivity. All so some selfish rider can have their loud toy.
If the DMV enforced smog checks for motorcycles this problem would disappear within the year - the aftermarket exhausts delete the catalytic system and mean that the output of oxides is actually higher than most cars. It's trivial to swap an exhaust but most riders won't bother to keep around an extra muffler just to swap it on every few years.
> This crime is basically impossuble to police because you need an offer with a reliable sound meter device in the right place at the right time.
I live down the street from a biker club clubhouse. It would be beyond trivial to police this here, but of course the police don't care. Or, worse, probably have some sort of agreement with them. Meanwhile, I get woken up at 3am several times a week by a loud bike that sets off car alarms as it goes by.
Officers can give a ticket simply by inspecting the muffler. They don't need to measure the sound. Non-compliant mufflers lack the EPA sticker required by law.
Great news, and I hope this catches on elsewhere. Our acoustic environment is a commons, and a particularly fragile one at that. Quiet surroundings are a boon to health and happiness, a fact that is not only immediately obvious to anyone with ears and a nervous system but also proven by scientific studies. However it can be destroyed so easily by one a-hole to the detriment of all. It's about time we start protecting it.
On the one hand, I think red light cameras and automated speed traps are unconstitutional and there have been shady companies caught fixing them. I hate the idea of putting super sensitive microphones in public spaces and connecting them directly to police departments.
But on the other hand, fuck loud cars and motorcycles, they are a menace to society, and they are the only thing that makes my blood boil, when they wake me up at 2am.
There have been microphone arrays in many neighborhoods for years:
"ShotSpotter has been in operation for 25 years, serves more than 120 cities..."
https://www.shotspotter.com/
Speed- and red-light cameras are constitutionally problematic because they generate CRIMINAL citations without proof of who was actually doing the driving.
Holding the titled owner of a vehicle responsible for excessive noise or pollution, though, makes sense regardless of who's driving. I see no issue here, while I definitely oppose the former.
Oh, that's fine, we'll just limit cars at the speed limit. They all ship with GPS for 20+ years, it's time to use it. Nobody needs to pay, nobody needs to simulate a PID controller.
This is an excellent example for people concerned with privacy rights.
In order to have nice things the population really needs to culturally understand that "with great power comes great responsibility".
Instead we have a culture of entirely selfish individualism, so the popular backlash is that damn near everyone is this thread (including myself) applauds the erosion of privacy rights because we're fed up and sick of living in a society with assholes.
If we can't govern ourselves voluntarily, we'll be governed by machines that we build.
We do desperately need to have income and wealth-adjusted tickets for these things though. A $20 slap on the wrist might be more than some people who are on the edge of homelessness can afford while a CEO might need a minimum of a $10k fine to even register for their attention.
About 7 years ago I was toying with making an open-source raspberry pi with a decibel meter you could stick to your window and it would listen for loud noises and tweet the police department to say that a loud noise (likely motorcycle groups that ride up and down my street) had been located at X location.
I had a few friends who said they would also put them in their windows, so we could have a few devices coordinate to confirm it wasn't just a loud neighbour or something.
I built a prototype, but when I started measuring how loud the motorcycles were, it was often within the legal limits (I think 80db or something).
Partly, this is because it was inside my apartment, but they sure sounded loud.
I spoke to a police officer friend about what to do, and he said the police just didn't care. I pointed out how easily they could use a decibel meter on their phone to measure how loud, but it was a complete non-interest for them.
Good to see NYC taking action on this. Hopefully more cities follow suit.
I find towns and cities to be unbearably noisy now and almost all of that noise is from cars and other motor vehicles. Certain people, of course, need to stand out from the crowd and have responded by making even more noise. Some of those cars and motorbikes are obnoxiously loud, but I think something like the top 20% are louder than they have to be. It needs to stop. There are studies showing the bad effects of noise pollution on people's health. Electric cars should reduce the overall noise level but the outliers definitely need to be targeted.
Noise pollution is a major consideration of mine (now) when choosing where to live. Having lived 'downtown' in a major city, in an older building, it was near the top of my 'list' of nuisances and materially impacted my quality of life. Cops also never did anything about it.
Can we start using something like this with light meters to ticket obnoxious LED beams that have not been properly retrofitted into older cars?
It's extremely obvious which cars these are when you're driving at night. That these people are endangering dozens of other cars on the road is lunacy.
Honestly. Loud motorcycles is annoying but the LED shit is actually dangerous. If theres 1 coming the otherway I legit can't see the road in front of me until its passed. Im kind of considering getting some though, because its kinda a positional arms race about "who can have the brightest lights to see the best at everybody else's expense". Its mean but I don't wanna be the guy who gets fucked over and blinded then found at fault.
In most states those are actually illegal to turn on when driving on a street or highway. Source: owned a 4x4 for off-roading that had a bunch of KC lights on top. I was advised by the installer to keep the covers on them because it's illegal to have them on the street in an uncovered state. Other source: got pulled over for something, and the cop let me go because someone drove by in what looked like a UFO landing sight.
Oh my god, how can I get two of these? I want one facing each way down the street.
I would love to somehow take the ticket money from people who deliberately make their cars obnoxious, and use it to help people with shitboxes fix their mufflers.
Fantastic! I live in south Queens next to the Brooklyn border and good lord the idiots here with their loud cars. Every night it's a cacophony of revving engines, tires screeching and exhaust bangs. You hear the same bullshit sound repeatedly every god damn day. Usually a slammed mustang, infinity or BMW with a two step or whatever that noise making exhaust mod is and either an instagram tag or car club name. And its not just a few cars but a culture around here. You see these clown cars parked all over the neighborhood and I know a few spots where they congregate and street race. The city's response so far has been to install speed trap cameras all over the damn place and nothing else. And people are complaining, loudly, but no one has been seemingly listening.
Though my gripe about this is: Many of those cars have questionable registrations with mostly PA and FL plates. Those guys purposefully gun it for the speed cameras as the tickets go nowhere. The city installed a speed camera the block before me and one night walking home from the store I saw a supra speed down the block, a residential street, at 50+ mph with middle fingers out both windows for the camera. I want these people to die.
For the unfamiliar, in addition to 'loud pipes' motorcycles, the biggest thing this is for are 'fart cars'. They're all over NYC. These are generally BMW 3 series, Infiniti, etc that are tuned and have specific exhausts to sound like they have more performance than they do, and to backfire after revving and then spooling down a bit... aka fart. They try to achieve the loudest possible rev and backfire, sometimes sounds like gunshots. They drive up and down residential streets in the outer boroughs mostly at night, revving and farting over and over. Residents here in NYC despise them.
These should be placed along every major artery in NYC with enormous fines for violators. If people want to behave like selfish children they should be treated as such.
This is great, I am all for enforcing more quality of life measures over things like street sweeping. Ticket people who take two parking spots by not pulling all the way forward, loud cars, loud subs, etc. All the things that make living in a city that much harder. If you want to live in tight proximity with tons of people it is reasonable that you need to have a higher level of consideration.
Worse than motorcycles are cars with a "pop and bang tune". I can hear these things literally for miles, and they run all day and all night. It's extremely annoying.
Somehow the police do almost nothing about this stuff (except what NY is apparently going to do), but the federal government has the time to force tesla to remove the "make fart noise after horn" option from my car.
Unfortunately I’ve spotted at least one of these in NYC driven by a city firefighter. So no chance of enforcement for at least that guy and his stupid exhaust.
[+] [-] udfalkso|4 years ago|reply
Police enforcement could probably solve the issue just as effectively. Cops ignore loud honking and loud cars when its right in front of them. If they would just stop ignoring such things the frequency would surely go down as well.
[+] [-] jmpman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alistairSH|4 years ago|reply
We have a similar problem. Replace "motorcycle" with "bro-dozer" and make it 4am.
Noise sucks. And since the pandemic lockdowns have lifted, it's even more abrasive. Those few months of relative quiet were marvelous. Where I live, it's a lot of tire noise from a highway over a mile away - just a constant background "brrrrrr" that I didn't notice before and can't ignore today.
[+] [-] jackson1442|4 years ago|reply
Literally one person. Always the same car. I am so sick of this shit. Management is sick of it but "can't do anything." I have yet to meet a neighbor who is not aware of this problem and sick of it.
I'm honestly amazed at the audacity of these people.
[+] [-] Sharlin|4 years ago|reply
I definitely want to step on anyone's "freedoms" if those freedoms egregiously infringe on other people's freedoms.
[+] [-] xkqd|4 years ago|reply
I know your scenario is particularly egregious, but there’s other stories in this thread that make me wonder how someone can live in Manhattan or along an interstate highway and still complain about noise.
[+] [-] bogwog|4 years ago|reply
For extra fun, automate it to start playing music as early as you can to match their sleep schedule, even when you’re out of the house. Say that it’s to warm up your speakers for when you get home.
[+] [-] mschuster91|4 years ago|reply
Jesus. At that point I'd go up to questionably legal methods to get these fuckers some justice. People who intentionally murder cats deserve everything that's coming for them.
[+] [-] lanamo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shtopointo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahthat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fallingknife|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowmessage|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiveturkey42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iqanq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|4 years ago|reply
I find it hypocritical for someone to drive and complain about noise from a major road.
And it's why people choose not to live near major roads.
[+] [-] jdprgm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] habosa|4 years ago|reply
The vast majority of motorcyles in America are illegally modified to be louder than they should [0]. This crime is basically impossuble to police because you need an offer with a reliable sound meter device in the right place at the right time. I am glad NY is going to automate this.
I used to live on a street (Guerrero St in SF) that had loud motorcycles ripping down in the middle of the night on a daily basis. Every time this happens I am sure multiple people wake up, causing loss of sleep and therefore loss of happiness and productivity. All so some selfish rider can have their loud toy.
0: https://rickeyholtsclaw.com/2016/03/10/the-truth-about-loud-...
[+] [-] 0_____0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelnos|4 years ago|reply
I live down the street from a biker club clubhouse. It would be beyond trivial to police this here, but of course the police don't care. Or, worse, probably have some sort of agreement with them. Meanwhile, I get woken up at 3am several times a week by a loud bike that sets off car alarms as it goes by.
[+] [-] mleonhard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RivieraKid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmageggy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] humanistbot|4 years ago|reply
But on the other hand, fuck loud cars and motorcycles, they are a menace to society, and they are the only thing that makes my blood boil, when they wake me up at 2am.
[+] [-] zanderz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubermonkey|4 years ago|reply
Holding the titled owner of a vehicle responsible for excessive noise or pollution, though, makes sense regardless of who's driving. I see no issue here, while I definitely oppose the former.
[+] [-] drsnow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stefan_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lamontcg|4 years ago|reply
In order to have nice things the population really needs to culturally understand that "with great power comes great responsibility".
Instead we have a culture of entirely selfish individualism, so the popular backlash is that damn near everyone is this thread (including myself) applauds the erosion of privacy rights because we're fed up and sick of living in a society with assholes.
If we can't govern ourselves voluntarily, we'll be governed by machines that we build.
We do desperately need to have income and wealth-adjusted tickets for these things though. A $20 slap on the wrist might be more than some people who are on the edge of homelessness can afford while a CEO might need a minimum of a $10k fine to even register for their attention.
[+] [-] diebeforei485|4 years ago|reply
If you want to modify your vehicle for performance on the racetrack, fine. But when you leave the racetrack, make it compliant again.
[+] [-] pedalpete|4 years ago|reply
I had a few friends who said they would also put them in their windows, so we could have a few devices coordinate to confirm it wasn't just a loud neighbour or something.
I built a prototype, but when I started measuring how loud the motorcycles were, it was often within the legal limits (I think 80db or something).
Partly, this is because it was inside my apartment, but they sure sounded loud.
I spoke to a police officer friend about what to do, and he said the police just didn't care. I pointed out how easily they could use a decibel meter on their phone to measure how loud, but it was a complete non-interest for them.
Good to see NYC taking action on this. Hopefully more cities follow suit.
[+] [-] aqme28|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] globular-toast|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] errantmind|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antisthenes|4 years ago|reply
It's extremely obvious which cars these are when you're driving at night. That these people are endangering dozens of other cars on the road is lunacy.
[+] [-] collegeburner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indymike|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] myself248|4 years ago|reply
I would love to somehow take the ticket money from people who deliberately make their cars obnoxious, and use it to help people with shitboxes fix their mufflers.
[+] [-] MisterTea|4 years ago|reply
Though my gripe about this is: Many of those cars have questionable registrations with mostly PA and FL plates. Those guys purposefully gun it for the speed cameras as the tickets go nowhere. The city installed a speed camera the block before me and one night walking home from the store I saw a supra speed down the block, a residential street, at 50+ mph with middle fingers out both windows for the camera. I want these people to die.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gataca|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericmcer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thepasswordis|4 years ago|reply
Here's an example of what I mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DChy9sKVhEo
Somehow the police do almost nothing about this stuff (except what NY is apparently going to do), but the federal government has the time to force tesla to remove the "make fart noise after horn" option from my car.
[+] [-] Sohcahtoa82|4 years ago|reply
Pop and bang tunes sound like utter shit. They make your car sound broken, and offer zero performance benefit.
[+] [-] grvdrm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelnos|4 years ago|reply