Anecdotally, anyone who rides will you tell you this. It doesn’t matter how high your high viz vest is, or how loudly you rev your bike, someone will blindly cut you off and not realise you’re there until it’s way too late.<p>I’m glad to see the data to back that up. Maybe now my fellow riders can agree that their motorbikes are a bit too damn loud, and tone it down.
If they really did save lives, you would think the highway patrol officers who rely on their bikes for their safety and entire professional existence would be equipped with them. No, this is just obnoxious leisure bikers wanting to justify their unnecessary noise they inflict on the rest of us.
If motorcycles require loud pipes to be safe, they should probably be banned altogether - but I don't really think it is necessary to have loud pipes.
I can't find it anymore, but I remember seeing some article or infographic about how many 10 thousand people are loosing sleep whenever one person is driving with a loud pipe through an urban area at night. I get why you love your pipe and your car and driving and everything, but ultimately everything is broken when it comes to urban areas.
I have been a 100% motorcycle rider (that is, no cars) for roughly 38 years until my last accident ended it all, but no, I don't regret anything of it: riding bikes is simply a wonderful experience. In my youngest years I would love having a loud pipe, and I had a moderately loud one, until the day they stole my muffler in the school parking lot and that moderately loud turned into an absolute mess.
Anyway, having been young and full of testosterone, I perfectly understand why some people want loud motorcycles (and cars). To me it all boils down to ancient instincts: the loudest beast is the one who marks the larger territory, and is perceived as the most powerful one, that is, the one who <i>collects</i> more females. This can be understandable in youngsters, not so much in grown ups.
Not only does the sound from bikes not reduce traffic violence, the sound itself causes immense amounts of measurable and real harm in the form of noise pollution. Many studies are confirming that noise pollution causes way more damage to the health of human beings than we realized.<p>Obviously, some things in the world are necessarily loud, like a jet engine on a plane. Or they are loud with a meaningful purpose, like a big sound system at a concert. But some things are unnecessarily loud with no purpose. Mostly vehicles with modified exhaust and sound systems, but also some other things.<p>If the noise pollution studies are accurate, reducing or eliminating these sounds will extends the lives of untold numbers of people. People will be healthier thanks to getting better sleep not being woken up. People will have lower blood pressure, and therefore reduce heart disease. People will have less road rage, which will in turn reduce traffic violence.<p>How do we actually reduce these sounds? Our current policies are not working. Fining people, impounding vehicles, I don't believe any of that will work. It will simply create revenues for the government.<p>But what solutions does our current society offer that will work? The criminal justice system is not a solution, and will simply cause even more harms. Any solution I can think of that will work is ludicrous and unrealistic.<p>The best thing I can think of is to simply ban the import or manufacture of the exhaust pipes to begin with. If the supply of them is greatly reduced, and the prices go way up, that could go a long way. It's too much to enforce any restriction one by one. It has to be from the top.
I am keeping the stock pipe on my bike, the folks at Honda did a good job making it have a nice tone without being loud. Decent burble I can hear while riding but only just barely over the wind. I really don't need anyone else knowing what RPM I am at as long as I can hear it myself I can use it to guide my shifting. Plus the last thing I want is to wake the neighborhood when I leave early or arrive home late.<p>I once had a VW pickup truck, 70hp, which at one point had a broken header. I bring up the power and model just so you know how ridiculous it was to drive around at a Nascar sort of volume. I hated driving it for the week it took to get parts.<p>I don't mind nicely tuned exhausts, you can make a bike sound really nice compared to the near silence out of so many stock systems. Somewhere around 80-90db both sounds good and is auditory to the rider.<p>Tinnitus is no fun, the wind noise already aggravates mine as is. I wouldn't risk a ride on my neighbor's Harley for more than a couple minutes, must be something like 125db.
>With the motorcycles’ front wheel next to the car’s rear wheel, one of the motorcycles can be heard inside the car and three motorcycles can almost be heard but, “unfortunately it is too late to be safe.”<p>These sound like very quiet cars[0] or not very loud motorcycles. Maybe my anecdata is flawed but I'm pretty sure I can make out motorcycles (and loud cars) on throttle driving an entirely different road, 100's of ft away when I'm driving, nevermind a straight piped harley 2 car lengths behind.<p>[0] I don't drive a new enough vehicle to attest to modern NVH isolation, but if the driver of a car truely can't hear a ~105 db exhaust noise (~comparable volume to say a horn, or the scream of someone being run over) the problem might lie with the car.<p>edit: for comparison, a car horn is apparently ~110-115db vs an allegedly 105db motorcycle that was tested. (5-10db is a lot more than it looks, but that should be the ~equivalent of hearing a horn honk from ~100ft away @-6dB/100ft)
> <i>Researchers found that even the loudest pipes are very hard to hear in a modern car.</i><p>Somewhat related, but I think it's so weird all the hate cyclists listening to music get. I don't do it myself, but I soo often read online motorists being angry on some cyclist with their airpod in or something. But even then, a cyclist is probably much more aware of their surroundings. <i>If</i> that's the standard that should be applied, drivers should be mandated to drive with their windows rolled down and no music as well..<p>Also, this shows how useless a small bell is on a cycle to alert drivers. Hence why have a 115 dB AirZound attached to my bike as well. Sure gets their attention when they think their negligence was about to get them t-boned by a truck.
I can’t load the article because of the captcha, but based on the comments I’m assuming it’s about loud motorbike exhausts.<p>It’s not just bike exhausts that are loud either. Every night I hear a nearly endless stream of modified cars with pop and bang tunes. There’s not even the supposed justification that it makes you safer in a car, it’s just people doing deliberately inconsiderate things with their vehicles. It’s inflicting annoyance and misery on people for no reason but clout, and we should have less tolerance for it in society generally. It’s also the same drivers who are racing through city centres. I don’t know if they’re just racking up loads of fines and not paying them, or if they’re using swapped plates, but either way, it needs to be enforced better.
In the hierarchy of road hatred, loud motorcycles are by far the most hated by all others (cars, pedestrians, cyclists, etc). Happy to hear there's no science/safety reason to encourage loud motorcycles.
This is total garbage lol.
You can absolutely watch cars move out of the way when motorcycles with loud pipes come through...
Its amazing to experience on your own as well.
Flawed premise in their research. They’re saying you can only hear motorcycles within 33ft, which is too late to react anyhow.<p>The times when I’ve intentionally revved my engine to get attention, it’s because a driver was about to merge into me, and they were very close. In heavy traffic I’m often feathering the clutch, and pulling it in quickly to rev is an easier reach than hitting my horn.<p>Anecdotally, when I switched from a small somewhat quiet bike to a full size cruiser I had WAY fewer sketchy interactions with drivers. They noticed me much better, which kept me safer. I also find loud pipes annoying, but not as annoying as people in cars killing others with the inattention.