I entirely agree that there is substantial tolerance for vehicle noise tolerance and this drives me crazy. Cities aren't loud, cars are!
I just want to make clear though that replacing the ICE part with electric engines solves the problem for low speeds only -- once they're going at a reasonable speed, engine noise doesn't dominate (if you exclude the antisocial behaviors of deliberately loud vehicles, most motorbikes).
I sometimes miss the constant din of the city, I have heard nothing but wind and waves for the past week and those are louder than any densely populated area I have lived in. Now that they have settled down the crows can hear each other so they have been at it all day. When it actually gets quiet is when I miss the city the most, I like the quiet but every noise breaks that silence which demands your attention making it difficult to concentrate on anything. It is now below freezing and everything green is gone, everything is getting hard and that is when things really get loud here, nothing to absorb sound but plenty to reflect it. Nature is pretty noisy for the most part, while it seems quiet compared to the city it is actually just different.
Sometimes when it is quiet here I wonder what the noises of nature must have been like to people a century or two or three ago when the wind was not just wind but something which could destroy your crops and make the next year very difficult for you. Or the extended lack of noise constantly reminding you that the drought continues and even the animals have had the sense to move on while you watch your fields slowly die. City or nature our relationship to the sounds around us have changed quite a bit, we can now choose to ignore the majority of sounds and write them off as meaningless or irritating if we can not manage to ignore them but those sounds are never meaningless, they all signify something more than our irritation.
Right now I am missing the wind and the waves and feeling the constant low rumble, I really hate listening to the compressor on the fridge but if it stopped making noise I would probably be more irritated by the thought of spoiling food and the potential inconveniences which that would cause. Never could hear my fridge when I lived in the city, if it stopped working it would just be an issue to deal with when I discovered it was no longer cold, not something I had a constant reminder of.
>It's interesting that you didn't once mention the sound of humans.
I think they are implied by the din of the city which is the din of people even if it comes from a loud car, that loud car is loud because of a person. For the driver of that loud car being able to really hear the engine could mean the driver is the sort of person who wants to hear the engine and is the sort who can isolate each and every sound the engine makes telling them a great deal about how well it is or is not working. Or their engine might be about to fail and it is a constant reminder of another thing they need to figure out how to pay for and praying it holds out until next month when they get their Christmas bonus even if that means the kids will have not have much of a Christmas. Or it might just be that it is their way to block out the constant din of the city. Or they may just want the city know that they are there, that they exist. screaming to the heavens as it were.
All those sounds which make up the din of the city have meanings and are personal, they connect to a person and a life. But I did make a conscious decision between natural and unnatural noise, nature vs city, people are sort of a grey area there and getting into that would complicate my point. The person living out in middle of nowhere miles from anyone is generally allowed to make as much noise as they please unless you happen to be camping near their property, then they are probably going to be considered rude for disturbing the tranquility and your vacation from the city even though you are the one encroaching on their life, not the other way around. As far as you know no one lives within 100 miles of your campsite and here are all these noises which do not belong 100 miles from civilization.
> Nature is pretty noisy for the most part, while it seems quiet compared to the city it is actually just different.
Variation. In countryside, a cow mooing or a rooster whatevering will quite reliably wake one up. In suburbs, a car passing by will annoy the shit out of you watching a movie. In a city, one does not even notice emergency services passing by with sirens blaring.
In a countryside noise floor is so low you can hear leaves falling. In a city noise floor is the cars passing by and we adjust to that.
Are pickup trucks "commercial vehicles"? Either way there's plenty of them in residential areas, revving up at 5am or rumbling home in the dead of night.
They really don't need to be, but jerks sometimes do modify them to be loud even when idling. About five years ago I lived in a neighborhood where some jackass would idle his modified truck every morning at a quarter till 5am. He'd leave around 5am and you could hear the truck for at least a minute as he left the neighborhood and started accelerating hard on the highway. His house was across the street and four doors down and his truck still could be heard through my bedroom window which faced the backyard. I don't know how his next door neighbors tolerated it. This was an exurban area with lots of pickups and even a few commercial vehicles in the neighborhood but he was the only one whose vehicle was loud and it obviously was made that way intentionally.
