Big Noise. Bring on the noise cameras, now!

Who has a game against Big Noise? It’s retail policy, of course, but it’s such blatant retail policy that it’s a wonder our governments haven’t made a play for acting on behalf of civilized society. Michael Pascoe offers a solution:

For the admirable reason of keeping the peace, my neighbors in Sydney are legally prohibited from firing up their Victas after 8pm or before 8am on weekends. The lawn mowing ban ends at 7 a.m. on weekdays.

Other neighbors are required to turn off music and television at 10pm Sunday through Thursday and midnight on Friday and Saturday. It’s inaudible inside my house.

On the other hand, a few blocks from me, the guy with a two-wheeled 747 engine and a megaphone instead of a muffler is free to roam the streets whenever he wants, knocking on windows, waking kids, and causing opossums to fall from the trees. (Okay, maybe not the opossums, but the rest.)

And drug dealers, real estate developers and nepo babes (who else would spend the fat end of a million on a supercar?) compensate for their personal inadequacies with anger by cranking the rivets of their machines at traffic lights and between speed bumps, displaying not the horsepower but the screams of thousands of cats skinned alive. It’s okay guys, you go ahead.

look at me

Of course, you don’t need a Ferrari to ruin the night. Most of those who scream and roar are far from him; their drivers share the same desperate need to be noticed. “Look at me! I have a machine that makes noise! ​​That means I’m, I’m, I’m, um, something!”

Fair enough, as school children they were the class clowns, taking pride in loud farts. This fits the mindset of people whose road cars are pointlessly set up to backfire, trying to stop by barking/farting.

It’s time to revive the 2007 NSW anti-speed ad in which the young woman now wags her pinky at motor farts: “No one sees you as big.”

Hilariously, it is specifically against the law for Ronnie Revhead to “use a vehicle (other than entrance and exit) that can be heard on a neighbour’s residence between 20:00 and 08:00 on a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday, or between 20:00 and 07:00 on any other day, on residential premises”.

When Ron takes his WRX out on the street, he uses BYO earplugs 24/7.

Do you know these characters and want more? Individual motorcycles are just too noisy, but try enjoying pack rides on city and suburban streets. Multiply “too loud” by 20 and you can experience how life crashes against the airport fence with an A380 overhead.

Unenforced laws

Sure, you might think there are laws against obnoxious vehicle noise. Yes, no, and up to a point, Mr. Minister.

For example, there is the Environmental Protection Operations (Noise Control) Regulations 2017, which includes specific offenses of all kinds, but the rules and tests are complex and laws are not really laws if they are not enforced.

You are free to report noisy vehicles in NSW and there were indeed 4,455 such reports in the 12 months to April 30 last year. And the fines handed out by the police were exactly zero.

In the previous five years there were 34,195 reports and only 74 penalties were issued.

It seems the public got the message. Because reporting was futile, fewer reports were made and even fewer penalties were handed out. Noisy vehicles are not a priority for authorities. (I suspect a fair percentage of the previous 74 fines were not just noise-related either.)

sleep killers

To be fair to the police, it is not easy to catch the unnecessary, annoying and stupid speeding device.

A noisy midnight party is not moving. After the notice, he will wait for the police to arrive to deal with the incident.

The V6 internal combustion engine of a certain Italian work of art which I greatly admire, operated normally and if any authority wishes to test it, is not antisocial at all, but if a goose wishes to be a goose, as a goose would, not only Macbeth kills sleep.

It doesn’t have to be this way. No one needs excessive, completely unnecessary noise in a crowded city, or indeed any city, especially in the early morning hours.

Other major cities (New York, London, Paris) already have a partial solution: noise cameras. Just as speed cameras catch a speeder in the act, noise cameras catch screamers, barkers, and roarers screaming, barking, and roaring.

The NSW Environmental Protection Agency is nearing the end of a 12-month trial of three such devices in the Bayside and Wollongong council areas.

That’s more than Google tells me any other state does, but it takes 12 months? And of course before the bureaucratic wheels set the political wheels in motion, the data will of course need to be carefully evaluated if they are to move and are not quietly appropriated by the anti-silencer lobby. No policy turbochargers here. Don’t retire your earplugs or put off double glazing.

For this sufferer of midnight road noise, the halfway mark of the trial was more than enough to justify the widespread use of cameras.

EPA trials

In response to my question, a spokesperson for the EPA said that through June, trial cameras had detected 2,500 “noise events.”

“A ‘noise event’ can be triggered by any loud noise source,” the spokesperson’s statement said. “This includes a loud car or motorcycle, but can also include thunder or garbage trucks. EPA analyzes each incident to verify its source.”

(Good idea. It’s hard to book God or BoM for thunder.)

The EPA said more data and analysis is needed before drawing conclusions but has some preliminary thoughts:

• There are certain days and times when noisy vehicles and driving behavior increase. Night hours and weekends currently produce the most noise incidents.

• Motorcycles are responsible for most of the noisy incidents recorded in the trial so far, but make up just 4% of all registered motor vehicles, according to Transport for NSW data.

• A significant portion of noise incidents are caused by repeated crimes.

This tells you everything you really need to know, and anyone with an ear in the important places already knows it.

The EPA is keeping the locations of the test cameras secret to avoid influencing drivers’ behavior during the trial. Can we please start using these for auditing purposes and keep locations private and mobile to absolutely influence the behavior of drivers and passengers everywhere?

trial bikes

The motorcycle finding raises another question: Why should we allow excessively noisy bikes on our roads in the first place? Or at least impose a curfew on them like we did on motorized lawn mowers.

Powerful bikes don’t need to be screaming. The only ones making a lot of noise are the sirens on police motorcycles.

Trail bikes, which can be heard from across the thousand-acre paddock, have no place on city streets, especially at night. Whatever machine is a few blocks away, turn it off.

Apart from the extreme danger it poses to drivers – every driver knows that at some point they will drop it on the ground in the hope that it will not run into the path of a bus – and hence the cost to society, motorized two-wheelers do not need to bother themselves with excessive noise.

If you want to play hospital roulette while riding on two wheels, buy an electric bike instead.

And I write as someone who has yet to go the electric vehicle route, loves his internal combustion engine cars, enjoys the sound of a good engine shifting through gears, and has no problem with the deep bottom of a reasonably driven Harley.

But there is no other reason than lack of political will and delay that innocent bystanders are being brutalized in open-air cafes and at home at night by the above-mentioned incompetence.

Turn on the noise cameras, now!