We need a trumpet and lawn mower noise bylaw
There are two kinds of loud, city council seems to think: There is regular loud and there is motorcycle loud. Regular loud is merely annoying. Motorcycle loud soon will be illegal.
Council this week voted to draw up a bylaw that would single out motorcycles from all other noise sources and penalize riders whose machines are deemed excessively loud. The proposed legal limit is 92 decibels.
In isolation, this number is just about meaningless. My own motorcycle is not excessively loud, I hope, but it might exceed the limit if you put your ear right up to the exhaust when I cracked on the throttle. Presumably the bylaw, or the police who enforce it, will establish a standard distance.
But will the sound level then be measured with the bike at idle or when the throttle is opened, and by how much? A lot of bikes are relatively quiet at a steady speed but crazy loud under hard acceleration. Which one applies?
In Edmonton, which has had a motorcycle noise bylaw for years, the sound-level meter is held 50 centimetres from the exhaust pipe’s business end. Never mind that this is closer than the pipe ever gets to anyone’s ears, unless he is down on all fours on the street and crawling through traffic, in which case he probably has bigger things to worry about than a noisy motorcycle.
Edmonton’s bylaw sets the limit for motorcycles at 92 decibels with the engine at idle or 96 decibels at any higher throttle setting. In practice, however, it’s a little more complicated. Edmonton police for some reason apply different rules to different kinds of machines. Bikes with a two-cylinder engine ( i. e. Harleys) are held to a quieter standard than sport-type bikes with a four-cylinder engine, even though the bylaw itself makes no such distinction. That reminds me of the distinctive, loping sound of an idling V-twin: Arbitrary, arbitrary, arbitrary …
When an indignant Edmonton rider challenged an excessive noise ticket on the grounds that police methods were unscientific, he was acquitted. The city did not appeal, probably because a higher court would have thrown out the bylaw along with the ticket. As it is, the noise bylaw remains in effect, under active enforcement and no more scientific than it ever was.
As well as arbitrary, these bylaws seem discriminatory, too, singling out motorcycles as they do. A lot of lawn mowers, for instance, are louder than the limit proposed here for motorcycles. It doesn’t seem fair to drag decent, hardworking bikers into court for noise infractions while outlaw homeowners get away with mowers that are noisier.
A lot of cars and trucks, too, are noisier than the limit proposed for motorcycles. What about those sporty little cars with the fart-can mufflers? Not only are they loud, they sound awful.
At least a V-twin motorcycle sounds good, up to a point.
It isn’t just vehicles making noise. No one has taken a reading, but that busker who is always on 21st Street probably exceeds 92 decibels. I’m guessing he reaches into triple digits on the chorus. When you hear him singing, a loud motorcycle comes as a relief, but guess who gets the noise ticket.
Even a piano can exceed 100 decibels. That’s why it’s a good idea to wear some kind of ear protection when your kid is practising her scales.
A piano isn’t even the loudest of unamplified instruments. There’s a joke among musicians: What’s the difference between a trumpet and a jet plane? The answer: About three decibels. But it’s motorcycle enthusiasts and not trumpet players who get singled out and picked on.
Even a clarinet can reach 114 decibels. Are we really going to ticket people for riding motorcycles that are not as loud as a clarinet, while clarinet players get off scotfree?
I live not too far off a flight path. Among the planes flying low over the neighbourhood are CF-18 fighter jets. One of them would drown out 100 of the loudest motorcycles. A police officer who held his sound meter 50 centimetres from the jet exhaust would be burned up and his ashes scattered into the next time zone. Of course, these fighter jets are helping to secure our freedom.
Motorcycles are more like an expression of that freedom. Sometimes it gets loud.