> This is a major reason that people pay for premium lounge access, it is not the food, nor the booze but the quiet that is the true luxury.
Not true for middle-class lounges such as Centurion, Priority Pass, and most airline lounges (Polaris, Flagship, Senator, Singapore, etc).
Most go for food or drinks. The lounges are often crowded and loud with silverware, plates, kids, and TVs.
For elite lounges such as the Private Suite, Lufthansa and Emirates First Terminal, yes, quietness is a big selling point. But at this point, you’re on the vector to flying private domestically.
I went to a medical clinic a few weeks ago. This clinic is in a town which is a Native American enclave within a regular city. The natives there are majority Catholic, and there is a colonial-style church in the middle of town.
I was 45 minutes early, and the only soul in the waiting room. The TV was blaring and I tried sitting right under it so I wouldn't be distracted by it. But it was playing some reality show featuring young adults. They had some outing to a cemetery, and they were actively, constantly making crude sexual references, and then they started mocking and blaspheming the Catholic faith, (the faith of the native population being "served" by these predatory White colonist medical people) and joking about ghosts and séances and other garbage.
So, I went back to the front desk, and I simply politely asked if she could power off the television. She seemed perplexed by my request, like nobody asks that, but she didn't ask why, and she complied with my request, and I enjoyed some peace and quiet after that.
The Lufthansa first class lounges/terminal were mid compared to United's business class lounge? I could understand that if you are in the Lufthansa Senator lounges, those are the business class and star alliance lounges.
What made the United's business class lounge better than something like the first class terminal at FRA and directly being dropped off at your plane?
> lufthansa elite? MUC/FRA was pretty mid. Polaris SFO was amazing
I’m not talking about Lufthansa’s Senator or business class lounges that anyone with Star Alliance Gold can access. Those are at the level of Delta Sky Clubs or the new 2023 United Clubs.
I’m talking about an entire private terminal with chauffeur service to the plane.
Korean emergency alerts are a good example. I got 5-10 a day during my first week in Seoul. At first it's scary, then it's annoying, then you turn them off.
I managed a product that was producing nearly a million exceptions every week. The developer considered almost every circumstance to be an exception. Username and password wrong? Exception. Form field not validated? Exception! Request timeout, ah! Whatever will we do! Exception! There were even some exceptions for things that went well. But you can imagine, if everything is exceptional, real issues don't stand out anymore and go unnoticed.
>also has implications for designing software notifications and dialogs.
I block notifs[1] from 99% of the programs on my phone because THEY. ARE. NOT. IMPORTANT.
The small handful of programs that do have notifications enabled are because they actually are worth my attention.
[1]: No, I refuse to properly call them notifications because notifs are not notifications. Notifications shouldn't be making me question if they are important, hence notif.
There also are cultural norms and/or enforcement around stuff like loud cars or trucks. I visited Asian cities recently and did not notice offensive noise. No crazy/rowdy yelling people, quiet buses.
I slept in quieter neighborhoods but they were still dense.
I do actually imagine a rough transition period for some in denser housing in places like America and Australia. I don't think we quite have the outward thoughtfulness as a societal norm, that makes it work in some cultures.
The existence of levels of menu options itself is puzzling. Is there really 50 different bank customer service specialisations such that someone who can do more than one of them is like asking for an astronaut surgeon?
> Is there really 50 different bank customer service specialisations such that someone who can do more than one of them is like asking for an astronaut surgeon?
No, but I suspect that time that you would be in a queue anyway where they can get you to do work to select the right script for the person you eventually get connected to have loaded is time that they can shave off the actual connected time on the call, letting them serve more customers per unit time with the same number of staff members and making the user experience for using the telephone less pleasant so anyone who can manage it (even if they would generally prefer telephone otherwise) and has a problem where it is possible will avail themselves of self-service solutions via the website rather than calling at all.
The true goal of most customer service systems like that is to make you decide it’s not worth the hassle and give up. Viewed from that perspective I think labyrinthine phone systems make a lot more sense.
Absolutely. Walking around Osaka, Tokyo etc, it's so incredibly quiet. Eventually you will come to a road and the difference is so obvious, you really feel how unpleasant roads are in a city.
It's surprising how much a bit of distance helps too. Just a street back from a stroad and you're already much better off sound wise. We don't have to abandon roads just be smarter with where we put faster roads (50kmph+ is probably not what people think of as fast but I find that is when noise is at unpleasant levels to those on the street. As well, it's tires not exhaust noise causing the majority of noise)
There are probably people reading this who like me thought nothing of road noise, no big deal, just a fact of life. But spaces are so much nicer without rushing cars on the majority of thoroughfares.
I bought a house on one of two roads into my town and the difference between night (no cars) and day (lots of cars) is night and day. It’s so noisy during the day that I use headphones to watch tv, but at night it’s turned down to quite a low volume level.
I chose this house, I’m not complaining, but I would enjoy a world with less to zero cars.
Exactly; I live in Tokyo and even in areas with huge apartment blocks, it's very quiet, particularly at night. The only place it's noisy is near the highway (and even that isn't that noisy compared to American highways, because the speeds are significantly lower). It's one of the many reasons I moved here.
“Stroad” is the urbanism aficionado portmanteau of street and road; a common feature in North American urban and suburban design where the speeds, (lack of) curves and lane-count of roads are combined with the traffic lights and access to businesses and homes of streets (and all their attendant car infrastructure).
Exactly, which is why I reject it as douchey, judgmental bullshit. We have terms for each type of thoroughfare in English already; they're seen on street signs and maps all over the USA.
The noisiest vehicles in the centre of Copenhagen seem to be diesel delivery vans, so it's a decent improvement as these are swapped for electric ones.
The context was "densification if done right could even make things quieter", and Copenhagen — at least the centre and inner districts — is generally considered to be doing things right.
Slowly driven electric cars are slightly quieter than slowly driven petrol/diesel cars, but the greater improvement is the slowly driven vans, trucks, refuse lorries and so on.
(Especially the electric refuse lorries! No more loud diesel thing emptying bins at silly-in-the-morning.)
> The context was "densification if done right could even make things quieter", and Copenhagen — at least the centre and inner districts — is generally considered to be doing things right.
Which is precisely why their traffic composition is different than that of American cities. I absolutely believe that the lowest-hanging fruit in many of Copenhagen’s streets are diesel delivery trucks. I do not believe that American cities have adopted the kind of forward-thinking policies that would have reduced other sources of traffic noise to the point where those are the largest contributors.
We're talking about densification. In a non-dense (e.g. American) city, everything is spread out, there's highways, so cars travel very fast. In a dense city like Copenhagen (and also here in Tokyo), there aren't many highways or cars so the traffic is mostly trucks traveling at low speeds.
Tire noise is negligible at very low speeds, but diesel engines are noisy. So in a dense city, you notice the noisy trucks with their clacking engines. In an American city, vehicles are whizzing by at 100+kph on multi-lane roads or highways, so you hear tire noise, even from a distance.
Making all the cars in America electric isn't going to do anything about highway noise. But making all the trucks in Tokyo electric would really make the roads here a lot quieter (and they're already pretty quiet, it just depends on where you go; places with lots of stores need trucks, whereas neighborhoods don't).
Road noise is mostly white noise when indoors, and reduced to nearly inaudible by good windows. The really disruptive noise is caused by increased density - the apartment above with a subwoofer or an exercise routine that involves dropping weights, kids running up and down the hall shrieking, stuff like that. Landlords are supposed to address issues like that, but getting them to handle noise issues can be very frustrating. Living in a detached house is incredibly quiet compared to dense apartment accomodations.
This isn’t really a problem in modern buildings built from concrete to condo specs. It just happens that most dense US cities have much older buildings, or that people put up with low quality buildings built to rental specs because landlords are allowed to get away with it.
Concrete can be isolating between floors but it's common even for "luxury" construction to cheap out on build materials in walls, allowing way too much sound between units and between units and common hallways.
Perhaps so - but that's a function of what people put up with and buy anyway, rather than a defining feature. The building I lived in until recently did not have this problem.
You would think... During COVID I discovered that my upstairs neighbor had a regular aerobics time that apparently involved jumping or skipping or something. Weekday mornings, like clockwork, despite having a gym in the building.
There are definitely advantages to living in a condo or apartment, but the reality is that living in close proximity to a bunch of other people is going to be noisier. New condos tend to be better, but impact noise in particular still carries to adjacent units. Same with noise carrying from common areas like hallways.
This is a claim from one of the militant urbanist YouTube channels. The method used to establish that was using a microphone next to a road.
The issue is that people don't care about the noise on the street nearly as much as they do about the noise inside their dwelling. And car noise doesn't make it inside the houses while people noise does, and, with the dense housing, often originated in the same building. And a microphone outside an apartment complex will indeed fail to record e.g. a fitness enthusiast on top of your bedroom setting an emergency lifting reps record at 3:30 am.
Noise caused by residents of high-density housing is typically well-regulated by community standards and peer pressure. Eight years ago, when I was touring a model unit, I asked the landlady if it was quiet here, and she said yes, other than people coming home from work. And this has proven true. 95% of the time is it peaceful, quiet, and idyllic. I live in very close proximity to 100 other families encircling a courtyard. I often hear swimmers in the pool, but I seldom hear loud amplified music, fights, dogs unduly barking at nothing, or other disturbing noises.
I live in a college town, but I do not live in a college community. As such, the city has rather strict and extensive ordinances against noise, such as that generated by parties. Therefore, both the landlady and law enforcement are on our side if we ever have trouble with noisy neighbors.
I don't know how it is in other cities. I've heard from friends who lived in Manhattan that sometimes the noise was intolerable, but nothing could be done about it. Perhaps if neighbors don't care about neighbors, that's what happens. We have yet to progress to such anarchy around here, fortunately.
I live on a corner of 2 double-track, relatively busy streets. 5th floor. Right now traffic is pretty low, no horns honking, no douchebags with loud mufflers, no sirens.
Window open, about 4m away from it at my desk, noise level is 45-55dB.
High-ish. To the front, where my window faces, there's a small park and then more or less only houses until about as far as the eye can see (a few other buildings but not many, and not quite close.
In any case, yes - it's relatively dense and car noise is very high. When I closed the window I could finally hear my tinnitus against the backdrop of near silence. I didn't realise how much the street noise was affecting me either, even though it was constant.
I don't really see a point in complaining about street noise with open windows/doors. You can close them and if you had not been living in an apartment you could have ones that do not pass a lot of noise. Nobody said there is no street noise, it just does not make to the houses because houses in general have means to mitigate it. Unlike apartments, where, even if you have got windows and doors with any sound insulation, you are still exposed to the noise coming through the walls and also people screaming much closer to your windows and doors. A source of noise 10' away from your window projects 100 times more energy on its surface than a source 100' away.
That's your problem right there. I figure if I opened the window on the opposite side of the house and there were no wind, birds and insects I could easily hear traffic too. The difference between this and having people behind your wall, floor and ceiling is that you can close the window whenever you want. You cannot do much with the neighbors.
Having lived in super high density for 25+ years, this is really not true. Sounds like you don't have a lot of personal experience with that. Yes, "cars" are noisy and are a part of the noisescape in dense cities, but it's much worse to deal with public transportation (buses), dogs, people getting back home at night, workouts, remodeling, loud music, airplanes (high density areas often have at least one nearby airport), people fighting, sports celebration etc etc.
I live in car-ridden Suburbia now. When my relatives from the dense city visit, they are blown away by the silence.
Maybe things are different in Japan, but everything is different in Japan.
They go up if you build more densely and then hop in your car and drive an entire block to your destination, which some Americans insist on.
But if you walk, bike, take transit, it gets better.
People don't automatically adapt just because you build it differently and people typically have trouble imagining genuinely living differently without actually experiencing it.
I don't disagree entirely but if you genuinely build a low-car dependent neighborhood it will be too inconvenient to use your car for a short hop.
Speeds are way lower in dense neighborhoods, and no on street parking, so the noise is lower and it's a pain to pull your car in and out. Most noise is tire noise not exhaust (except your odd racer boy and their fart cannon exhaust)
I see you never lived anywhere with decent public transportation. Better public transportation infrastructure + increased density + parking is expensive + increased traffic = reduction in car usage over time.
It's America's problem of its own making, you need to find a solution, just shoving more lanes for cars, more suburbs with single detached homes, is not solving absolutely anything. No, not every rural small town will have Dutch-levels of access to trains but you can definitely improve the situation on the densely populated areas of the East and West coast, just have to get rid of this obnoxious and gauche car-addiction.
The longer you take to transition out of car-dependence, the more painful it will be.
Good luck on solving it, doesn't seem like American society put much value in it, you seem to like to suffer in traffic.
I have lived in a city with what in the USA passes for "decent" public transportation: Chicago. And I used it. But a "city" like L.A. will never have sufficient trains, because it's a giant county masquerading as a city. It's unlikely that a citizen works close enough to home to do anything except drive there.
That's why the endless proselytizing about "Let's be Amsterdam!" is soooo tiresome. We're not fucking Amsterdam and never will be. I love Amsterdam, but it's just not applicable.
Also the vilification of houses is obnoxious and dumb. The USA is not "full." Some people actually want to DO things, like garden or have a workshop or a swing set or a kiln. That means they want a HOUSE, and guess what? It's a hell of a lot better than covering up every square foot of ground with concrete for high-density apartment blocks, preventing water from percolating into aquifers and intensifying the permanent drought that reigns over much of the west.
Not to mention the "heat islands" that endless densification creates, and the trees destroyed for it.
The endless bellyaching by fake liberals about "zoning" serves as a smokescreen for corruption: a handout to developers and a license to destroy already-residential areas, while giant dead malls with boarded up Macy's stores and vast concrete parking lots sit growing weeds. THOSE have already imposed costs on the environment and are already "high-density," so until every one of those is redeveloped (along with every defunct commercial or manufacturing zone) we should never be targeting neighborhoods with actual HOUSES.
Zoning is USEFUL. It allows people to choose the kind of neighborhood they want to live in. People who want density and walkability have downtown. People who want a house can choose neighborhoods zoned for houses. And some neighborhoods blend the two pretty effectively. But pretending that zoning is always a racist, elitist conspiracy is infantile at best and more often an excuse to destroy neighborhoods for someone else's profit.
No citation. No evidence. No thought process. No credibility.
Where do you think dead malls are, exactly? I live in an SFH neighborhood that's threatened by developer giveaways, and there is a boarded-up Macy's and defunct Fry's growing weeds within two miles. And, to the west, there are stretches of decrepit small-commercial/industrial tracts awaiting rejuvenation. But NOPE! Let's let developers replace one house with 10 FUCKING UNITS, with no permits or review.
SFH are unsustainable, they don't generate enough tax income to maintain the infrastructure they require, they are subsidised by the denser parts of a settlement. Why should society subsidise the lifestyle of a richer caste who can afford SFH close to cities?
> Also the vilification of houses is obnoxious and dumb. The USA is not "full." Some people actually want to DO things, like garden or have a workshop or a swing set or a kiln. That means they want a HOUSE, and guess what? It's a hell of a lot better than covering up every square foot of ground with concrete for high-density apartment blocks, preventing water from percolating into aquifers and intensifying the permanent drought that reigns over much of the west.
It's not about being "full", it's about creating an urban environment that can enable humans to live without a car. The Netherlands has many suburbs with mixed SFH, some duplex buildings, rowhouses and so on. It creates denser packs of urbanisation that allow even small towns/settlements to share a downtown feeling with shops and local commerce while still providing housing for people who prefer to live in a SFH.
The issue with American suburbia is very similar to a monoculture plantation: instead of creating suburbs with a variety of different houses to accommodate differing levels of needs and incomes, which can sustain some kind of a local life (with local bars, restaurants, grocery stores) the US has zoned out most of that to only allow detached houses, creating pockets devoid of life except for individuals in their houses (like a monoculture, devoid of an ecosystem).
You don't need to get rid of SFH, you just need more mixed usage of the land, keep the SFH suburbs around a small center with denser housing which can support local shops on their ground level, like you said the US is not full, there's space to do it this way, it's just a matter of policy, not a law of Nature.
It is worse than that. They say it, stopping the musak with a slightly noisy pause first which almost sounds like someone picked up the phone so now I need to pay attention for the 4 hours it takes to get through not just zone out and code.
It then become asshole design when they add 3 rings before that pause as if you finally are getting through! Evil phone system designers!
I always wondered why they did that. Is it supposed to fool you into thinking stuff is happening in the background? Like the computers are working really hard on your case, just be patient?
"Your call is important to us" but not "Your reason for calling is important to us". When the call is what is considered important, isn't prolonging the call the ideal?
We’ve flown several times with our small child, who has been woken so many times by pointless PA announcements on the plane and in the airport. Life already sucks in coach seating, OK? Just let us suffer in peace!
I'd say one of the bigger issues is due to how legal everything has become.
Most of those air cabin PA announcements are necessary to legally cover their asses. I doubt am airline would want to find out what happens in court if they didn't give those ps announcements.
There's big variation between airlines, though, so I think that's not the entire explanation. In many cases I think that there is nobody involved with the decision of which announcements to include who really has the job of caring about the overall passenger experience.
In some airlines in Asia you get every announcement in three languages, and your IFE is interrupted by all of them, regardless of whether you understand just one. Even worse, they put short pauses between them, teasing you with a couple seconds of your movie before interrupting it again. A basic level of care would be to interrupt the IFE only for the language you had chosen for the IFE when you first sat down.
They can't really rely on the IFE being set to the correct language.
I can read enough of several languages to navigate the menus, choose a film and so on, but not enough to understand the safety briefing. Many people won't touch the IFE at all, especially before take off.
But without the in flight PA announcements how else would you be aware of the special offer for the branded airline card?
I almost feel bad for the attendants slowly walking down the aisle afterward sadly holding up the offer paperwork after the announcement while everyone sits there annoyed waiting to land.
Passing through Jakarta airport the other day, there was an announcement which was literally on a continuous loop with no pause in between. It was only about 15 seconds long. Considering I couldn't understand a word of it, after a short while my mind drifted to a mental playback of the "corporate accounts payable Nina speaking - just a moment" scene from Office Space. Nobody around me seemed to be disturbed by it at all, though.
Jakarta's airport and the general Indonesian attitude towards regulations was for me encapsulated in seeing an air conditioner unit in the domestic airport with prominent NO SMOKING/NO SITTING signs, with an Indonesian dude happily perched on top smoking kretek like a chimney.
Complain about too much communication. Complain about too little. The happy medium is somewhere in the middle. The stressors are the complainers and extremists (author of this article included).
Apparently I'm spoilt, as the airports I use most often (Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London Heathrow) are all quiet, with no announcements until at the gate when boarding behind.
Though every time I travel by train in England, they seem to have added more pointless drivel to the railway station security announcement. ("This is a security announcement. Please do not leave baggage unattended anywhere on the station. Any unattended articles may be removed and destroyed by the security services. If you see anything suspicious, please tell a member of staff. Remember, see it, say it, sorted." Back when the IRA were actually leaving bombs around, we only needed the italic bit.)
More disturbing to me is how loud it gets when you're actually on the airplane.
The plane itself is very loud, that can't be helped I guess, but the crew seemingly has to shout irrelevant things at you every five minutes through that awful megaphone style onboard speaker system.
For the millionth time some safety instructions, then welcome this, goodbye that, please buy perfume, please buy lottery cards, please reserve a shuttle taxi, and so on.
All very loud, and combined with a sound quality that reminds me of a 20 bucks portable radio makes for a miserable experience.
I vote for quiet airplanes in addition to quiet airports!
This is really about the scourge of useless "communications."
California is the epicenter of this BS. They actually have announcements called "sigalerts" and "red flag warnings." The incontrovertible failure of those names is inherent in their meaninglessness.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 380 ms ] threadNot true for middle-class lounges such as Centurion, Priority Pass, and most airline lounges (Polaris, Flagship, Senator, Singapore, etc).
Most go for food or drinks. The lounges are often crowded and loud with silverware, plates, kids, and TVs.
For elite lounges such as the Private Suite, Lufthansa and Emirates First Terminal, yes, quietness is a big selling point. But at this point, you’re on the vector to flying private domestically.
I was 45 minutes early, and the only soul in the waiting room. The TV was blaring and I tried sitting right under it so I wouldn't be distracted by it. But it was playing some reality show featuring young adults. They had some outing to a cemetery, and they were actively, constantly making crude sexual references, and then they started mocking and blaspheming the Catholic faith, (the faith of the native population being "served" by these predatory White colonist medical people) and joking about ghosts and séances and other garbage.
So, I went back to the front desk, and I simply politely asked if she could power off the television. She seemed perplexed by my request, like nobody asks that, but she didn't ask why, and she complied with my request, and I enjoyed some peace and quiet after that.
What made the United's business class lounge better than something like the first class terminal at FRA and directly being dropped off at your plane?
I’m not talking about Lufthansa’s Senator or business class lounges that anyone with Star Alliance Gold can access. Those are at the level of Delta Sky Clubs or the new 2023 United Clubs.
I’m talking about an entire private terminal with chauffeur service to the plane.
More is not always better when it comes to warnings, and is often worse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
If everything is a priority... then nothing is a priority.
I block notifs[1] from 99% of the programs on my phone because THEY. ARE. NOT. IMPORTANT.
The small handful of programs that do have notifications enabled are because they actually are worth my attention.
[1]: No, I refuse to properly call them notifications because notifs are not notifications. Notifications shouldn't be making me question if they are important, hence notif.
"The pointlessness of this counsel needs no elaboration."
Or all the texts I get about remindeds of appointments followed by asking for reviews.
It's like every channel is being abused to get us to do something. And I fail to pick out the important ones.
Side note, with people wanting more dense housing, noise levels will go up.
I slept in quieter neighborhoods but they were still dense.
No, but I suspect that time that you would be in a queue anyway where they can get you to do work to select the right script for the person you eventually get connected to have loaded is time that they can shave off the actual connected time on the call, letting them serve more customers per unit time with the same number of staff members and making the user experience for using the telephone less pleasant so anyone who can manage it (even if they would generally prefer telephone otherwise) and has a problem where it is possible will avail themselves of self-service solutions via the website rather than calling at all.
It's surprising how much a bit of distance helps too. Just a street back from a stroad and you're already much better off sound wise. We don't have to abandon roads just be smarter with where we put faster roads (50kmph+ is probably not what people think of as fast but I find that is when noise is at unpleasant levels to those on the street. As well, it's tires not exhaust noise causing the majority of noise)
There are probably people reading this who like me thought nothing of road noise, no big deal, just a fact of life. But spaces are so much nicer without rushing cars on the majority of thoroughfares.
I chose this house, I’m not complaining, but I would enjoy a world with less to zero cars.
Next!
Next!
The noisiest vehicles in the centre of Copenhagen seem to be diesel delivery vans, so it's a decent improvement as these are swapped for electric ones.
Slowly driven electric cars are slightly quieter than slowly driven petrol/diesel cars, but the greater improvement is the slowly driven vans, trucks, refuse lorries and so on.
(Especially the electric refuse lorries! No more loud diesel thing emptying bins at silly-in-the-morning.)
Which is precisely why their traffic composition is different than that of American cities. I absolutely believe that the lowest-hanging fruit in many of Copenhagen’s streets are diesel delivery trucks. I do not believe that American cities have adopted the kind of forward-thinking policies that would have reduced other sources of traffic noise to the point where those are the largest contributors.
Tire noise is negligible at very low speeds, but diesel engines are noisy. So in a dense city, you notice the noisy trucks with their clacking engines. In an American city, vehicles are whizzing by at 100+kph on multi-lane roads or highways, so you hear tire noise, even from a distance.
Making all the cars in America electric isn't going to do anything about highway noise. But making all the trucks in Tokyo electric would really make the roads here a lot quieter (and they're already pretty quiet, it just depends on where you go; places with lots of stores need trucks, whereas neighborhoods don't).
There are definitely advantages to living in a condo or apartment, but the reality is that living in close proximity to a bunch of other people is going to be noisier. New condos tend to be better, but impact noise in particular still carries to adjacent units. Same with noise carrying from common areas like hallways.
The issue is that people don't care about the noise on the street nearly as much as they do about the noise inside their dwelling. And car noise doesn't make it inside the houses while people noise does, and, with the dense housing, often originated in the same building. And a microphone outside an apartment complex will indeed fail to record e.g. a fitness enthusiast on top of your bedroom setting an emergency lifting reps record at 3:30 am.
I live in a college town, but I do not live in a college community. As such, the city has rather strict and extensive ordinances against noise, such as that generated by parties. Therefore, both the landlady and law enforcement are on our side if we ever have trouble with noisy neighbors.
I don't know how it is in other cities. I've heard from friends who lived in Manhattan that sometimes the noise was intolerable, but nothing could be done about it. Perhaps if neighbors don't care about neighbors, that's what happens. We have yet to progress to such anarchy around here, fortunately.
Oh really? I’m sitting inside my apartment listening to car noise right now. Our apartment sits away from the street too, probably 150ft away.
Window open, about 4m away from it at my desk, noise level is 45-55dB.
Window closed, 25-27dB.
Almost all of it is car noise.
In any case, yes - it's relatively dense and car noise is very high. When I closed the window I could finally hear my tinnitus against the backdrop of near silence. I didn't realise how much the street noise was affecting me either, even though it was constant.
That's your problem right there. I figure if I opened the window on the opposite side of the house and there were no wind, birds and insects I could easily hear traffic too. The difference between this and having people behind your wall, floor and ceiling is that you can close the window whenever you want. You cannot do much with the neighbors.
I live in car-ridden Suburbia now. When my relatives from the dense city visit, they are blown away by the silence.
Maybe things are different in Japan, but everything is different in Japan.
Densification allows you to reduce car dependence, and most city noise is from cars.
But if you walk, bike, take transit, it gets better.
People don't automatically adapt just because you build it differently and people typically have trouble imagining genuinely living differently without actually experiencing it.
Speeds are way lower in dense neighborhoods, and no on street parking, so the noise is lower and it's a pain to pull your car in and out. Most noise is tire noise not exhaust (except your odd racer boy and their fart cannon exhaust)
Increased density means increased traffic, period. Has this equation been reduced by working at home? Sure. But it remains a fact of life.
It's America's problem of its own making, you need to find a solution, just shoving more lanes for cars, more suburbs with single detached homes, is not solving absolutely anything. No, not every rural small town will have Dutch-levels of access to trains but you can definitely improve the situation on the densely populated areas of the East and West coast, just have to get rid of this obnoxious and gauche car-addiction.
The longer you take to transition out of car-dependence, the more painful it will be.
Good luck on solving it, doesn't seem like American society put much value in it, you seem to like to suffer in traffic.
That's why the endless proselytizing about "Let's be Amsterdam!" is soooo tiresome. We're not fucking Amsterdam and never will be. I love Amsterdam, but it's just not applicable.
Also the vilification of houses is obnoxious and dumb. The USA is not "full." Some people actually want to DO things, like garden or have a workshop or a swing set or a kiln. That means they want a HOUSE, and guess what? It's a hell of a lot better than covering up every square foot of ground with concrete for high-density apartment blocks, preventing water from percolating into aquifers and intensifying the permanent drought that reigns over much of the west.
Not to mention the "heat islands" that endless densification creates, and the trees destroyed for it.
The endless bellyaching by fake liberals about "zoning" serves as a smokescreen for corruption: a handout to developers and a license to destroy already-residential areas, while giant dead malls with boarded up Macy's stores and vast concrete parking lots sit growing weeds. THOSE have already imposed costs on the environment and are already "high-density," so until every one of those is redeveloped (along with every defunct commercial or manufacturing zone) we should never be targeting neighborhoods with actual HOUSES.
Zoning is USEFUL. It allows people to choose the kind of neighborhood they want to live in. People who want density and walkability have downtown. People who want a house can choose neighborhoods zoned for houses. And some neighborhoods blend the two pretty effectively. But pretending that zoning is always a racist, elitist conspiracy is infantile at best and more often an excuse to destroy neighborhoods for someone else's profit.
Where do you think dead malls are, exactly? I live in an SFH neighborhood that's threatened by developer giveaways, and there is a boarded-up Macy's and defunct Fry's growing weeds within two miles. And, to the west, there are stretches of decrepit small-commercial/industrial tracts awaiting rejuvenation. But NOPE! Let's let developers replace one house with 10 FUCKING UNITS, with no permits or review.
So... you're wrong.
> Also the vilification of houses is obnoxious and dumb. The USA is not "full." Some people actually want to DO things, like garden or have a workshop or a swing set or a kiln. That means they want a HOUSE, and guess what? It's a hell of a lot better than covering up every square foot of ground with concrete for high-density apartment blocks, preventing water from percolating into aquifers and intensifying the permanent drought that reigns over much of the west.
It's not about being "full", it's about creating an urban environment that can enable humans to live without a car. The Netherlands has many suburbs with mixed SFH, some duplex buildings, rowhouses and so on. It creates denser packs of urbanisation that allow even small towns/settlements to share a downtown feeling with shops and local commerce while still providing housing for people who prefer to live in a SFH.
The issue with American suburbia is very similar to a monoculture plantation: instead of creating suburbs with a variety of different houses to accommodate differing levels of needs and incomes, which can sustain some kind of a local life (with local bars, restaurants, grocery stores) the US has zoned out most of that to only allow detached houses, creating pockets devoid of life except for individuals in their houses (like a monoculture, devoid of an ecosystem).
You don't need to get rid of SFH, you just need more mixed usage of the land, keep the SFH suburbs around a small center with denser housing which can support local shops on their ground level, like you said the US is not full, there's space to do it this way, it's just a matter of policy, not a law of Nature.
It then become asshole design when they add 3 rings before that pause as if you finally are getting through! Evil phone system designers!
"We care about your privacy"
no. you. do. not.
Please don't pretend.
Most of those air cabin PA announcements are necessary to legally cover their asses. I doubt am airline would want to find out what happens in court if they didn't give those ps announcements.
In some airlines in Asia you get every announcement in three languages, and your IFE is interrupted by all of them, regardless of whether you understand just one. Even worse, they put short pauses between them, teasing you with a couple seconds of your movie before interrupting it again. A basic level of care would be to interrupt the IFE only for the language you had chosen for the IFE when you first sat down.
I can read enough of several languages to navigate the menus, choose a film and so on, but not enough to understand the safety briefing. Many people won't touch the IFE at all, especially before take off.
I almost feel bad for the attendants slowly walking down the aisle afterward sadly holding up the offer paperwork after the announcement while everyone sits there annoyed waiting to land.
Though every time I travel by train in England, they seem to have added more pointless drivel to the railway station security announcement. ("This is a security announcement. Please do not leave baggage unattended anywhere on the station. Any unattended articles may be removed and destroyed by the security services. If you see anything suspicious, please tell a member of staff. Remember, see it, say it, sorted." Back when the IRA were actually leaving bombs around, we only needed the italic bit.)
All very loud, and combined with a sound quality that reminds me of a 20 bucks portable radio makes for a miserable experience.
I vote for quiet airplanes in addition to quiet airports!
California is the epicenter of this BS. They actually have announcements called "sigalerts" and "red flag warnings." The incontrovertible failure of those names is inherent in their meaninglessness.