EXCESSIVE NOISE NOT JUST FROM MOTORCYCLES IN SUMMER

It’s 10:15 a.m. on a Wednesday in early May and a motorcycle has just blasted its way through my neighbourhood.

Unfortunately, the harmful and excessive noise from illegally modified vehicles is not just seasonally specific to where I live. Here in the Waterford Valley, we are plagued all year round, and in all weather, by the tuner car crowd, some modified to the point they could be mistaken for fighter jets. Some have added noise-makers that create a bizarre trombone/dying goose sound, gunshots or, inexplicably, farts. Whatever their preference, the noise pollution is deafening and intimidating. They lap our neighbourhood for hours.

If shattering the collective peace of everyone who lives in the area wasn’t bad enough, a number of them don’t start until 11 p.m. and continue on into the wee hours. Fewer drivers to get in their way, you see, as they tear around after each other, endangering anyone who might get in their way.

While they’re having a literal blast, residents like me lie in bed, filled with impotent rage and despair, staring at the ceiling and praying for them to go home out of it so sleep can finally come. Evidence-based research shows individuals who choose to modify their car/motorcycle/ pickup truck to make excessively irresponsible noise are inflicting damage on the physical and mental health of everyone around them. I’m not even getting into the dangerous driving aspect. It is pretty safe to say these drivers aren’t doing the speed limit when they open ’er up for a good rip the full length of the Pitts Memorial Highway.

At those times, I often think of 18-year-old Hannah Thorne, who was killed in 2016 by two street racers. I ask: How is it a relatively small number of people are permitted to illegally race and blast away in our communities — not just in my neighbourhood or just in St. John’s as it’s a provincewide problem — to the detriment, sometimes with deadly consequence, of others?

Mandy Cook

St. John’s