Intentionally loud exhausts are obnoxious and selfish. As much as I dislike it, however, I’d far rather deal with the noise than having yet more surveillance. We’re already the #3 most surveilled country in the world, only the USA and China is worse.
Harley Davidson bikes are just noise pollution. Unlike cars they are build like this out of the factory.
Yea to me it’s not the volume of the engine/exhaust. It’s that it’s intentionally obnoxious
No they aren’t. Harleys are quiet with the factory exhaust, it’s just that they are commonly modified with aftermarket (louder) exhausts.
We may be number 3 but we must be number 1 in terms of % of people monitored by some form of camera. The USA road network is nowhere near as heavily monitored as the UK.
Driving through France, Belgium and the Netherlands was very free compared to the UK.
A taxi driver in Singapore once told me that they hold this title, ahead of the UK. He then pointed out the cameras on almost every lamp post.
Ahh yeh that sounds about right actually.
Electrics cars will make it a non issue but then we will be stuck with the surveillance. Our country is scary. No one cares.
Having said that if you are intentionally being noisy for noisy sake there should be harder punishments. Even lose your license for a bit, it’s not a got given right to drive. You got to earn it.
All drivers should be considerate of others
Electrics cars will make it a non issue
I do not see EVs replacing scooters (which are driven by lower budget commuters). A single unmuffled scooter driving through #Paris at 3am can wake up 10,000 people according to Bruitparif. And don’t forget horns. Assholes will used their horns at 3am on my street. The only thing they give a fuck about is their own convenience when their favorite parking spot is taken.
The idea of harsh punishments works if a vehicle is continuously loud because it will eventually cross paths with a cop. So that position is fair enough. But what about horns? There’s never a cop around when horns are misused.
Electric scooters are a thing.
In fact they are huge.
I think not. But then I’m not living in a wealthy part of town. I think I’ve only seen one, ridden by a colleague. It only takes one of those little 2-stroke 50cc gas fuckers to wake up 10,000 people.
It seems most of the UK has forgotten the 5th of November
I’d far rather deal with the noise than having yet more surveillance.
My cognitive dissonance triggers on this point because one of the reasons I cycle is privacy. I am also firmly in the #fuckCars camp (noise, pollution, death, selfishness of people putting their convenience above lives of other people & animals). It’s hard to give a shit about car drivers having privacy. And also realize that car drivers inherently sign up to give up privacy in order to use a personal car anyway (registration, insurance, banking transactions tied to those activities and their fuel purchases, etc). The fuel purchases of car drivers feed the oil industry, which in the US feeds the war chests of republican candidates who disrespect both privacy and the environment.
Yet people making the wise pro-privacy considerate decision to cycle are still exposed to breath car fumes, noise, and life-threatening physics (e=mc²).
Hard to have sympathy for car drivers. Although my dissonance needle moves a bit more if these noise cams are always recording video and thus capturing all people not in cars. I don’t know if that’s the case.
yes, and here you have an opportunity for that overwatch to benefit your daily lives. Accepting it everywhere else but bitching about it here seems pretty self defeating.
If it wasn’t obvious, I don’t accept it everywhere else, I think the state surveillance apparatus should be completely dismantled.
I live in a city center, and frequently have loud cars drive past. Some are substantially worse than others. The loudest of them are so loud that when they go past I can’t hear my TV for 30 seconds or so, and that’s with my windows all closed and listening via headphones.
Something really does need to be done to enforce the noise laws that are often being ignored.
I never even considered that was an option. I figured loud jackasses was just something we’d have to live with.
Can we do this with mouths too?
I’m not really in favor of surveillance but it should be legal and socially acceptable to throw rocks at cars that have been straight piped. Fuck em. If you make your car louder on purpose you should be punished
I’ve always called them “Fart Pipes”
I’ll take the loud cars if we can get some real fucking regulations on headlight brightness so I don’t get blinded every time I drive at night.
There is already the regulation in the Highway Code:
114: “You MUST NOT use any lights in a way which would dazzle or cause discomfort to other road users”
The “MUST NOT” indicates that this is a legal requirement and so it is a criminal offense to disobey it. Now if we could get the police to actually ENFORCE the legal requirements in the Highway Code, then maybe things might improve on the roads.
I mean if that’s the case then they have to enforce it on the companies as well because in 2023 it’s the default on many models on the road, not even with their brights or high beams on.
Just went down the legislation.gov rabbit hole, and it seems there are regulations on headlight height and angle that have been in place since 1989, but unfortunately no maximum power or brightness restrictions.
Which means that although a driver could be fined for using excessively bright headlights, the manufacturer of the car could not be fined for making the car like that in the first place.
Perhaps if things like these noise cameras gain in popularity it will encourage the lawmakers to look at other issues like this one.
I drive a Mini. The SUV infiltration in this country is making night driving a miserable experience for me.
I kind of miss the days when most people around here drove a small car, now everyone’s in a tank.
I’m on the fence. Daft custom exhaust on a 1.5 turbo 3cyl is stupid, but there’s no way I can agree to more surveillance.
I guess it depends what your comfort level for surveillance is.
In this case, it would likely be “camera activated at 96dBA, numberplate in view was BO55 MAN, NIP being sent to keepers address”It would be brilliant if it was this isolated. But it seems like every step in surveillance always leads to more surveillance. It’s always some innocent excuse, without ever drawing the full picture together with preexisting stuff.
There’s now a generarion that has grown up without ever having experienced not being watched.
I’m on the fence with your statement because it kinda describes WRC cars and they’re FUCKING AWESOME
In general I wouldn’t mind people having the freedom to make their cars impossible to sit any reasonable amount of time inside, but I don’t currently have a suggestion on how to make certain peeps be not assholes in residential areas.
In regards to WRC - isn’t that world rally championship? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one happening anywhere near apartment buildings on single lane streets with cars parked on both sides and kids’ playground nearby.
I’m an American who stumbled here by accident but do you guys have many cars/bikes that are noisy out of the factory? The guys running Civics with a pineapple shooter look like assholes but I kind of get it if you’ve got a big V8 that just sounds like that
Nothing really sounds loud out of the factory. It’s always the peashooters with custom exhaust.
Some idiot is going to hang out near the camera with a boom box and play loud engine noises every time an electric vehicle drives by.
stop giving them ideas lol
You say idiot, I say conscientious objector
It will most deffo a member of the law and order party who love the law except when it impacts them.
Yeah that’s not what that means haha
(Apologies for USA centric comment)
I think if that was proposed in the USA, people’s heads might actually explode. When 2 roundabouts were put in nearby, some people acted like the UN new world order was on its way. I grew up in Basingstoke so I love roundabouts. Thankfully people have come around to the idea.
I’d support it just so my dog can walk near a road without some pickup gunning its engine as it flies past us. Any kind of traffic speed reduction is treated with fury over here.
People with loud pipes don’t realize they look like a nobend and sound like this: https://youtube.com/shorts/s0xqopmjbSo?feature=share
Don’t worry - that’s not purely American. People here acted like the illuminati were on the march when a couple of ‘school streets’ were announced (no access during pick up/drop off hours
“Think of the children!”
school safety measures implemented
“No, not like that!!”
I’m American and love roundabouts. I think my fellow drivers hate them because they require a small amount of thought and planning, which is too much to ask from your average American driver.
Roundabouts are easy, and easy to learn. When I got my license, there were just three roundabouts in my state. Now there are three within two minutes of driving, and a fourth one is planned.
Roundabouts are actually better than normal crossings for traffic flow and reducing the accident rate, but they require respect and consideration for the fellow traffic participants, so I don’t expect them to work in the US.
I agree they’re easy. Which is why I don’t understand why nobody else seems to be able to learn them
Roundabout installation should be celebrated. So much better than lights if you can drive. Maybe not so much for the walkers crossing.
So much better than lights if you can drive.
That’s the problem, most of our drivers can’t drive. I saw someone enter a roundabout in the wrong direction and get mad at everyone else.
Frustratingly in the UK, most roundabouts now also have lights on them
Yeh I like extra dark roads without those awful white leds. The yellow orange lights were great and plenty.
Oh I meant traffic lights
Ohh they are even worse. Let’s you halfway then blocks the other
Thankfully people have come around to the idea.
Hehe
:)
I grew up in Basingstoke
You poor bastard.
Hey, at least it’s not slough or staines!
Scunthorpe
Or Hook.
Have you seen the videos of those idiots trying to use the roundabouts in the US? They were totally clueless, and not even able to follow the signs.
I think if that was proposed in the USA, people’s heads might actually explode.
We already have traffic cameras everywhere, and I don’t see anyone’s head exploding.
All motorists are loud. Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
some are a shit-ton louder than others though
and the difference is personal opinion. We had anti-noise bylaw removed because of 2 factors, the limit was too high for most people (96DB) and because it’s really difficult and expensive to monitor. They need special noise detectors and they don’t have lots of them so they only used them in areas where most people complain and it resulted in zero change while increasing costs.
My motorcycle is loud. Louder than any stock car but it’s far from 96DB yet it’s also quieter than a lawn mower, or a weed whacker, or a plane so what do you about those noises?
It’s an easy fix. Vehicles are whatever volume they are from the factory. Then just ban modifying them in any way to become louder.
An absolute decibel limit doesn’t need to exist. You’re just not allowed to deliberately increase the volume of your vehicle above what it’s natural level is.
Amen. Steel legal shouldn’t include performance enhancements - get a track car and go at it where there’s a suitable environment!
Sod off back to fuckcars, will you?
Its motorbikes round my way that are stupidly loud. Not even kidding you can hear some of them a mile away. I know this because I can see the road about a mile away and still hear them!
South Park made a whole episode about these people.
Same here. And in recent years the amount of drivers are pushing their luck more. Like driving clearly illegal bikes, driving on grass parks and footpaths and even through underpasses. I saw three teenagers break into a bike shed to stash their stolen scooter in. The Police didn’t seem to care much even though I called with a crime in progress. Nothing like this happened where I live a few years prior.
Well theres no deterrent these days.
Another one is those electric scooters, they’re a real menace!
Yeah for sure. I honestly think electric scooters and electric bikes are the way forward (not wasting energy on 1-2 tonnes of metal while going round town). But until they are better regulated and enforced it’s just mayhem.
I saw a couple of cops stop a guy on a moped who was running a red light yesterday and I wanted to applaud. Mopeds and electric bikes (especially if they’re driven by food delivery people) run lights, go the wrong way on one-way streets, go on the sidewalk… And they’re not just doing this on empty streets. They usually stay out of the way of cars (being hit by a car hurts, I suppose) but they’re happy to cut off pedestrians. Heh, I think I haven’t seen them driving indoors yet but it’s only a matter of time since they’re almost never stopped.
I’ve had a fair few near misses with electric scooters both walking and driving. The main problem is kids who sadly have no road sense and don’t appreciate the dangers.
With motorbikes there is the additional problem that most of their owners actually rework them to be louder. I can regularly hear the motorbikes on the bypass, which is about the same distance, with a hill in between. You don’t hear the busy car traffic, but you hear the motorbikes.
Do it! I hate loud cars. Noise pollution kills.
I’ve taken to muttering “There goes the Vroom Vroom Man in his vroom vroom” every time one of these pricks rumbles by. It solves nothing, but makes me laugh.
So, now I have to choose which I dislike more: government surveillance spooks or jerks with loud engines? Jeez, that’s a tough call.
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to make it an MOT fail?
The point is that most really loud cars are made to be loud. And usually equipped with a way to quickly undo that, if needed.
I’ve seen a TV report on some policemen hunting “tuned” cars. They were following an obnoxiously loud car in an unmarked police car, stopped them, and took measurements - suddenly, the car was “just normal”. But they knew what they heard, and the measurements they had taken from a distance had been way louder than the measurements taken at a defined distance from the exhaust, so they impounded the car for further investigation. And found a switch in the glove compartment that changed the car from “normal” to “loud”.
You’ve got to catch them red-handed. As long as they can disable or just quickly undo something like that before a MOT , it won’t get a single idiot and his car off the road.
Ban it for all new cars then.
These are aftermarket installs.
People would just remove/silence the mods for the MOT and replace them as soon as they pass.
The experience in Germany is, that manufacturers will just engineer around it. You define a testing method and they will make sure their exhausts comply in that specific scenario, but are loud in all other cases. The most egregious example are probably motorcycles. The law limits most to 77dB(A), but in reality many are closer to 90dB or even louder. The government has been trying to define better standards, but we will have to see where that gets us. Real-life measurements are much harder to fake and probably more impactful.
Yes, this is something that’s unfortunately necessary
