I don't know... I lived in Barcelona for two years recently and had pretty bad luck. In addition to one-off incidents, some consistent noise issues we had:
- The Pakistani restaurant below our apartment would regularly host receptions/weddings until 2-3am. The sendoff typically involved groups of 20-30 people banging large drums loudly and singing as the happy couple walked out and were driven away.
- We had a neighborhood drunk who frequently (multiple times a week) would wander down the street singing Flamenco-style ballads about his unfortunate love life. My assumption was that the ex he was singing to lived on the street? Anyway, he had quite a voice and was great at projecting.
- The building behind us was shorter than ours and our rear balcony faced their rooftop. In the summer one of the apartments there would semi-regularly hold parties until 1am.
Cars were an occasional issue too, but people were a much bigger problem in that particular neighborhood. That said, I've also lived in dense neighborhoods with none of those problems, so maybe better norms/regulations are the answer... but existing noise ordinances in the US are rarely enforced.
Beyond the noise issues though I did enjoy the convenience/amenities that a dense neighborhood provides!
Theoretically all those interactions breach the social contract and could be acted upon by making complaints. However, someone loudly driving a multi-ton car down your road is always "okay".
Also... I live in a low-density urban neighborhood currently and it's the loudest place I've ever lived. Mostly it's road noise, but also one of my neighbors parties 12+ hours every weekend playing music very loudly. Some people are just loud, but cars make everybody loud.
> However, someone loudly driving a multi-ton car down your road is always "okay".
Cars with fart pipes installed are the same kind of violation. Modern cars with functioning mufflers or electric powertrains... aren't actually that loud.
> Modern cars with functioning mufflers or electric powertrains... aren't actually that loud.
Until their tires hit asphalt. Cars have to go very slowly for the engine to be louder than the tires, and that noise is a function of weight, and electric cars are heavier than equivalent ICE cars.
Most of the sound from a modern car with a functioning muffler is wind noise. You can barely hear the tires unless you're standing right next to it.
"Electric cars are heavier" is some silly nonsense where people went looking for something to complain about. You can make an electric car as light as you want, with the trade off that it implies making the battery smaller and reducing range. But the Model 3 has a ~300 mile range and weighs the same as the average car.
> Most of the sound from a modern car with a functioning muffler is wind noise
What? Like wind hitting the extremely aerodynamic surface of the car designed specifically not to catch the wind? I have never heard or read this in my life - it is widely known that tires-on-pavement is the biggest contributor of car noise. That roar you hear standing a quarter mile from a busy highway is not wind, it's the tires.
> "Electric cars are heavier" is some silly nonsense where people went looking for something to complain about. You can make an electric car as light as you want, with the trade off that it implies making the battery smaller and reducing range.
Again, this contradicts everything I've read and/or is just willfully ignorant. You can't make EVs superlight by stripping down the body, for example. The battery is the heavy part and while they may get more mass-efficient over time EVs are now and for the foreseeable future strictly heavier than same-size ICE cars.
EVs aren't the savior of the environment, public transit is. EVs are better than ICE cars in most ways, but for noise all cars are a problem and EVs are worse.
> What? Like wind hitting the extremely aerodynamic surface of the car designed specifically not to catch the wind?
Like the sound of a hundred cubic feet of metal displacing the air at 40 MPH and leaving vacuum in its wake, yeah. That they're designed to be aerodynamic is the reason they're not that loud.
> That roar you hear standing a quarter mile from a busy highway is not wind, it's the tires.
Now you're talking about highways. People don't typically drive at highway speeds on city streets.
> Again, this contradicts everything I've read and/or is just willfully ignorant.
People have agendas. They need some reason for electric cars to be bad.
The Model 3 weighs around 4000 pounds, as do the Ford Taurus, Chevy Camaro and BMW 3 series, all vehicles of approximately the same size.
Some cars are lighter than this. Some are heavier. In general the existing production electric cars tend to be on the heavier side because premium car buyers prefer longer range to less weight, and that's the trade off. But there is nothing inherently requiring that, and in fact electric cars with smaller/lighter batteries would be cheaper, so that's likely to be what happens as more affordable electric cars become available.
> You can't make EVs superlight by stripping down the body, for example.
If you have an electric car with a 1500 pound battery and a 300 mile range, there is a fairly obvious way to make one that has a 100 mile range and weighs 1000 pounds less, and it doesn't require changing the size of the cabin. You might even get more than 100 miles of range by doing this, because now the car weighs 1000 pounds less and requires less energy to accelerate.
> EVs aren't the savior of the environment, public transit is.
Public transit is inapplicable to any place without enough density to support it. More than two thirds of Americans live in suburban or rural areas. We could build millions of new high density housing units and the majority would still live in suburban and rural areas -- and that's unlikely to change, because housing is scarce and only a fraction of those units would be converted specifically because of how many more units you can put on a lot for high density housing. If you build 20 units to a lot you could double the number of urban housing units while only reducing the number of suburban/rural units by 2.5%.
All of the people who live there will continue to need cars.
> Now you're talking about highways. People don't typically drive at highway speeds on city streets.
That was an illustrative example. Tires typically overtakes engine noise at about 25mph. That's city street speeds. (In most car-dependent cities 40-50 is also typical city street speed.) Again, this is why tires are the majority of car noise. When you hear a car pass by on a non-highway road, you're mostly hearing tires.
If wind is a serious factor either you need to publish your secret findings or link me to some research I'm not finding.
> Tires typically overtakes engine noise at about 25mph.
This is like saying "a person typically travels at 30MPH". It doesn't mean anything. An off-road truck with knobby tires is going to have more tire noise than a sedan with snow tires which will have more than the same sedan with low rolling resistance tires. An 80s muscle car will have more engine noise than a modern 4-cylinder sedan which will have more than an electric vehicle. A gasoline vehicle under acceleration (as in stop-and-go city traffic) will have much more engine noise at a given speed. Tire noise is affected by the roadway material in addition to the vehicle. Tire noise in a 4000 pound electric car might overtake "engine noise" at a lower speed than it does for a 4000 pound V8, but that's because it's quieter, not louder.
> When you hear a car pass by on a non-highway road, you're mostly hearing tires.
Then why does it make a "whoosh" sound?
> If wind is a serious factor either you need to publish your secret findings or link me to some research I'm not finding.
I suspect the problem here is that the studies are so old. Here's the relevant sentence from the Wikipedia article called Road Noise:
> Noise of rolling tires driving on pavement is found to be the biggest contributor of highway noise and increases with higher vehicle speeds.
For this sentence it has three citations. One discusses the effects of road material on tire noise and not tire noise relative to other noise, another lumps tire noise and aerodynamic noise into the same category. The third, which is presumably where it got the premise, is from 1973, when cars commonly used bias-ply tires, which are much louder.
But let's not lose track of the thread here. The premise is that electric cars would be louder. A Model 3 is ~4000 pounds, the same as a Ford Taurus, so that's not going to be louder. Some cars are lighter -- a Honda Accord is in the same class and is ~3200 pounds, only 80% as much. But then it has a gasoline engine, which is louder than an electric motor. Does the 20% weight difference cause more noise than the gasoline engine vs. the electric motor? Somebody would need a dB meter to even answer it, and that's rather the point. Either way the difference is going to be small and people are just looking for something to complain about.
> This is like saying "a person typically travels at 30MPH". It doesn't mean anything.
No. It's very different. It's more like saying "a person is usually about 5'7"." It is obvious there are difference, but it's not something that varies minute by minute, and the range of differences is not stated. There's definitely not cars moving 40+ mph without making a lot of tire noise.
You're right those aren't good citations, I looked at it earlier myself and didn't like them, but I didn't go through the work of finding better ones. But seriously, can you find a single study saying wind is a dominant factor in road noise? Again, I've never heard anyone claim that.
> Then why does it make a "whoosh" sound?
Because, that's the sound it makes.
> But let's not lose track of the thread here.
This started because you claimed modern cars are not noisy except for those with modified exhaust pipes. I'm saying cars are fucking loud, all of them. Electric cars are also loud and do not solve for the problem of road noise at all. The fact that we're trying to figure out if wind or tires is the source of the noise that we both acknowledge is quite noticeable makes no difference except to support my actual point, that cars are loud.
> There's definitely not cars moving 40+ mph without making a lot of tire noise.
Based on what? A car with low resistance tires on concrete isn't going to make a lot of tire noise even at fairly high speeds.
> But seriously, can you find a single study saying wind is a dominant factor in road noise?
The one lumping tire noise and aerodynamic noise together is obviously contemplating that aerodynamic noise is a thing.
> Because, that's the sound it makes.
Tires make a rumbly sound, when you can hear them, as for example with the types of tires that make more tire noise.
> The fact that we're trying to figure out if wind or tires is the source of the noise that we both acknowledge is quite noticeable makes no difference except to support my actual point, that cars are loud.
There is a difference between something not being absolutely perfectly silent and something emitting a loud noise. Road noise for most modern cars at city speeds isn't loud. Exhaust noise for cars with negligently or intentionally defective mufflers is loud.
> Road noise for most modern cars at city speeds isn't loud.
If you can hear it and you're not next to the road, that's too loud. It's noise pollution. You can personally draw an arbitrary line anywhere you want to determine what counts as "loud", but the actual phenomenon is that cars make an amount of noise that is detrimental to our health, sanity, and wildlife.
As you note, no two dense neighborhoods are the same. Those experiences would be rare in Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur. I would say that cultural norms dominate density when it comes to explaining late-night partying.
recently moved half a mile further out from city center and can attest to all of this. Hookah bar in my case was blaring music at 1AM. People in various states of inebriation shouting to each other outside my bedroom window.
There's less car traffic too but that was such a background noise that I hardly noticed it. Though truthfully the first week or so at the new place I was conscious of it's absence.
Cars get into wrecks all the time :)
Seriously though we just normalise it.
If there is a car accident on your street everyone is awake.
How about cop cars and ambulances racing by sirens blaring at all hours.
People blast horns way louder than anyone will shout.
My early 1910s Manhattan building was fantastically quiet, with very thick walls. The only noise I ever heard was floor noise directly above me, never to the sides.
I'm guessing mid-1900s to early 2000s buildings are the problematic ones.
