I've lived in a dense urban environment before, and my personal experience is that I don't get pissed off about noises like trains or ambulances (both of which were a large percentage of the noise). There's just something about the raw audacity of someone _knowingly_ being an asshole by having very loud exhaust or music that gets under my skin. It just about drive me mad during the pandemic, where I felt I couldn't escape it - and ended up buying an in-town single-family house. My mental health immediately started to recover, and I truly believe it's because I'm now in a situation where my personal "noise space" isn't invaded as much by people who are _knowingly_ invading it.

I agree with you. It may be a mental bug on my side, but me being aware that the noise is caused intentionally, it's easily avoidable, it costs very little effort for the person producing the noise to stop the noise, the person knows this, and nevertheless they continue to produce the noise, with completely disregard of people surrounding them, just makes the bad experience much worse.

I used to live in a neighborhood of Queens next to an above ground line, and it is extremely loud. One thing I found interesting was that the support beams of the train were made of steel, however, down the street a little ways the support structure was built out of concrete. The concrete section was way quieter, despite looking nearly as old.

Having an above ground train that isn't deafeningly loud is a huge improvement to the neighborhood, and I wonder why we don't think more about making new quiet above ground lines, instead of drilling +$2B per mile tunnels. I understand that people may find them to be an eyesore, but the noise is the top issue by far. With 100 years of new technology since the last ones were built, we should be able to make huge improvements in this area.