How about the non-stop construction and non-stop road work? How about clubs and bars with outdoor speakers? Helicopters, industrial cooling/HVAC. I could go on. It's far more than just cars. What are these quiet cities that magically have none of these things?
I never noticed, walking around the nicer European cities, that any of those things made nearly the same level of noise as the cars. Seriously, walk through Paris or something and tell me that clubs and bars and helicopters and AC are even nearly as loud as the cars when you walk next to a busy road.
I can't think of an exception to this in any city I've been in, honestly. Which cities have lots of clubs and bars with loud speakers out the front? Is that common in the states?
In terms of decibels cars are indeed louder. But not all noise is created equal.
I have noise-cancelling headphones - they do a great job removing white noise(so traffic, among others), but aren't too effective against sounds with a more focused spectrum like people yelling in the middle of the night, bottles being broken or trash being collected in the middle of the night.
I...have walked around the less nice parts of Paris? I'm not sure what your point is. In the less nice parts of Paris, the noisy areas are still mostly the areas with busy roads. It's simply the biggest source of noise pollution in cities and I haven't found anything that comes close. Maybe in specific areas you can find people playing obnoxiously loud music with helicopters buzzing over constantly but that's certainly a very specific and hopefully rare set of circumstances. The same with yelling and crime and so on. If that's the default in your city I'd agree you have vastly greater problems than the sound of cars.
Not much a problem in my city, but those which I've been to that are seen as "walkable" and with a "vibrant city life". Essentially all places with considerable tourist traffic.
Paris is very densely populated - I'm surprised anyone attempts to drive there, because at these densities and distance between buildings it must be horrible.
My point is: it's not that clear cut. Removing cars is what makes places like Paris bearable, but the problem lies in the sheer population density that a truly walkable city over a certain scale requires.
I moved to a city that has 2/3 the population density of my previous location and even though it's just swamped with traffic, it's actually quieter on average.
I feel like population density is completely left out of the conversation. From my experience there's a middle ground between car-oriented suburbs and human pile-ups like Paris(or other cities approaching this density) which is rarely explored.
I certainly would agree that Paris isn't an ideal city. My experience has been that cities with 1-2 million inhabitants with reasonable, but not extreme, density (i.e. much denser than suburbia but less dense than Paris) have been the most pleasant.
That's not my point. My point is that the noisy parts are the parts with cars, and the areas without many cars do not have anything approaching the noise levels of busy roads. I am aware that not all of Paris is quiet and leafy...
Miami, NYC, LA to name a few. And it's far more prevalent now since covid as most places have some outdoor seating now and they've seemingly all installed speakers.
America fascinates me because half of the time things are functionally unregulated, and the other half of the time there's a law about Kinder Eggs and the exact height your lawn must be.
We're playing Call of Cthulhu pen&paper RPG campaign set in modern USA. Our DM has to check the laws in each state often, and usually it derails the session by how completely absurd it is.
Like our party was able to carry a bazooka around openly in one state :)
The HN demographics would regulate things to the point of absurdity if left to their own devices. In the US they only reach critical mass to do so in affluent suburbs, so you get stupid local laws about lawn height and other attempts at legislating conformity. Occasionally they get thrown a bone by the federal bureaucracies or legislators on some meaningless issue that nobody will care enough to oppose. This is how you get lawn darts and random food products effectively banned (not that lobbying doesn't also result in odd small things being banned too).
I don't know what the demographics of HN are, but while reading this I had similar sentiment. I don't like having to hear leaf blowers, but I really don't like other ppl telling me I can't use one. All regulations have a cost; I think I just weigh the cost more heavily in principle than many folks here.
Things like leaf blowers have solutions between "Wild West v8 supercharged beasts" and "every leaf must be hand picked up by your current cadre of indentured servants".
A perfectly practical solution would be for the town to designate "outdoor power equipment times" such as "Saturday, 10-4" or "any day, 10-12, 3-4" or similar.
Electric is helping but even then there's noise created from just the action of the device, and you also reach a paradox where as things get quieter the remaining noise sources become more annoying.
Pretty hard to price negative effects of noise pollution into fuel prices though, since it includes long term health, as well as property values and other things with massive confounders.
You can measure it. Find N pairs of regions where all factors except for noise pollution are similar, measure price of land differences, average them. You have the cost of noise pollution.
That's unfortunate, and definitely sounds like a problem that should be dealt with. For whatever reason the same thing didn't happen in Australian cities which are structurally quite similar to North American cities so it's not inevitable.
The Dutch city of Delft in particular is just intentionally designed to care about noise. Both design and regulations. Turns out that when you simply prioritize reducing noise, it's actually doable. And it's still a city, albeit a modest-sized small city, not a major regional hub or a global-level metropolis. But the lessons can be applied anywhere.
