Cities tell hot rod drivers: Quiet down!
State lawmakers look to make it easier to ticket for noise
Here come the sounds of summer: muscle cars and motorcycles, aka “crotch rockets.”
And here’s what leaders in Oakland County are doing about escalating vehicle noise, spreading nationwide from an epicenter right in southeast Michigan — on Woodward Avenue:
h The city of Birmingham recently approved a proclamation asking eight other communities to file a joint complaint about Michigan’s weak law on loud vehicles. Birmingham’s police chief says vehicles are louder, as more car buffs circumvent factory systems and new models offer instant dashboard settings to rev the roar. Under current law, police can’t nab most noise offenders. Still, Birmingham’s cops wrote more than 1,000 tickets this spring for speeding, reckless driving, and other violations that actually targeted loud exhaust.
h Royal Oak’s mayor and city manager sent letters in early June to state lawmakers. Their goal? Same as Birmingham: to toughen state laws, making it easier for cops to ticket loud vehicles. The letters came after residents’ complaints soared.
h Two state lawmakers from the Woodward Corridor in Oakland County said last week they’ll each introduce bills to curb vehicle noise, as soon as possible. They have experts with the state’s Legislative Service Bureau checking two things: How do cities in other states enforce “quiet hours” on state highways? And can cities on Woodward be allowed to enforce local noise ordinances stricter than state law? In 2017, scores of tickets written under a strict Royal Oak noise ordinance were dismissed after a lawyer, representing 15 violators, argued that in Michigan a city ordinance usually can’t be stricter than state law.
Amid all the complaints, hot rodders are leaving tracks on social media. They defend their hobby as fun and good for the economy. They buy hot rod parts from companies like Corsa Performance Exhausts in Berea, Ohio, whose website shouts in large type, “The Best-Sounding Exhaust on the Road: How to make your exhaust louder, deeper,
and more aggressive.”
Birmingham police Chief Scott Grewe has met repeatedly with other chiefs and with state lawmakers, seeking a new state law. “The cars that we’re hearing are so obscene, so obnoxiously loud — these are people spending money just to be excessively loud,” Grewe said.
“Nothing comes from a factory like that, but you can go online on Amazon and for just $40 get a louder car,” he said. Those willing to spend more money, hundreds of dollars, get a very loud car. Some hobbyists “cut the factory exhaust system right out and just run a straight pipe. The whole intent is just to make the vehicle loud. You’d have a hard time finding a motorcycle on Woodward with factory exhaust. They all put aftermarket pipes on,” Grewe said.
Ambiguous law
Not helping is jumbled wording in state law. Grewe knows the screwy sections by heart. Under Statute 257.707(c), “Section 3 says it’s illegal to modify your car’s exhaust to be louder, but Section 5 says you can do that as long as the sound isn’t excessive. So the statute contradicts itself,” he said, adding: “No police agency along Woodward is enforcing this statute because the language is ambiguous.”
A state lawmaker who met with Grewe is ready to fix that law. State Rep. Natalie Price, D-Berkley, said she’s planning to introduce a bill “to clean up this contradictory language.” Police who see a modified exhaust system just issue after a visual inspection.
“They can enforce this visibly,” Price said, although officers may need to pull over suspected offenders so as to inspect their machinery. She believes cops who say the noise levels are higher than just a few years ago. Some of the exhaust notes “quite literally sound like gunshots,” triggering flashbacks in veterans suffering from PTSD, Price said.
Just as bad as the law’s contradictory sections? Current state law requires that cops fiddle with sound meters, whose results are easily challenged in court. Officers must measure a vehicle’s sound levels in decibels from 50 feet away, a standard largely
unworkable on busy roadways, especially when hot rodders and motorcyclists roar by in convoys. Even when officers can isolate one vehicle as a violator, the effort usually takes two squad cars — one to measure, another poised up the road to give chase.
For decades, car buffs cruised and sometimes dragraced on Woodward Avenue, dubbed “America’s signature cruising highway.” Lately, though, the classic cars celebrated at the Woodward Dream Cruise are swamped by herds of late-model motorcycles and muscle cars, rumbling and screaming louder than any collectible. Gearheads gather on Woodward not just for the Woodward Dream Cruise in mid-August but from spring to fall, spewing pollution and noise often well past midnight, and from 8 Mile north to Pontiac. On weekends, fans sit on folding chairs to watch or stand at curbsides. Some hold cellphone cameras in one hand while gesturing to drivers with the other, hoping to film “burnouts” of smoking tires, accompanied by squeals of
acceleration and roaring exhausts.
‘If they don’t like it ... move’
Suppressing the subculture seems unlikely. A recent Facebook post from Royal Oak City Hall, warning hot rodders of the city’s “zero tolerance” for noisy vehicles, drew a string of hostile pushbacks. Cruiser Geoff Booth posted: “Tell your citizens, if they don’t like the tradition to move out then. The automotive enthusiast will be happy to buy into the neighborhoods!”
Nor will it be easy to change state law, Birmingham officials said. Their city staff has researched what happened when other states tried to quell motoring din, Mayor Therese Longe said.
“We’ve discovered there are impressive lobbying groups for the industries that produce these cut-out devices ... and they spend a lot of money to make sure that states across the country don’t change their laws” to ban such devices, she told the June 5 meeting.
“Well, we have a lobby group too — the voters,” Commissioner Clinton Baller countered. Baller said the noise problem amounts to a regional emergency, one that threatens public health. He’s not crazy.
A health hazard
Health experts say loud vehicles not only add stress to those driving near them, they upset people living nearby, often disrupting the sleep of school-age children. According to a 2019 study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, those who live near high levels of “transportation noise” are likely to have higher heart rates and blood pressure, increased arterial inflammation and — in extreme situations, such as near busy train tracks and airports — more heart attacks. Scientists also believe that intermittent noise, such as the occasional hot rod’s jarring roar, is more harmful than nonstop noise, even when decibel levels are roughly equivalent.
The loud zooming of dragsters isn’t just a Woodward problem. It’s spreading, officials said. From East Jefferson in Detroit to Telegraph Road in Bloomfield Township to Gratiot Avenue in Roseville, and in other cities nationwide, the roaring of sports cars and screaming of motorcycles echoes into the night.
Efforts to combat the problem with new laws, in other states as well as Michigan, have failed to pass in state legislatures — again and again, said state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak. Among the ideas that failed in lawmakers’ votes? Proposed bans on aftermarket auto parts designed to circumvent the factory-installed mufflers, McMorrow said. Also doomed is an idea suggested by some Birmingham officials — to let police ignore sound measurements and simply pick out noise violators based on each officer’s discretion.
“That won’t hold up in court,” McMorrow said. But she has ideas that she’s not ready to unwrap. Last week, McMorrow met with legal experts at the Michigan Department of Transportation, and she combined her ideas with theirs for drafting a stronger state law.
“We’re looking at all options,” she said, saying she hopes to introduce a bill very soon — possibly at the Senate’s brief session in mid-July, but no later than after the summer recess ends on Aug. 22.
Between now and then, a lot of exhaust will rattle a lot of nerves. Woodward Avenue in Oakland County has a long history of cruising pride and, frankly, drag-racing mischief, going back to the 1950s. Early on, pushing the pedal to the metal was a lark for a scattering of hot rodders. They rode the big engines in the Big Three’s heyday when the Beach Boys sang “Giddy up 409.” That storied tradition has morphed into a plague of ear-shattering muscle cars and motorcycles, in part because of recent techno-noise options.
Royal Oak City Manager Paul Brake likes muscle cars and owns a 2015 Chevrolet Camaro. But he doesn’t feel a need to rattle his neighbors’ windows, nor does his car let him do that with the touch of a finger. Newer models do. “You can just manually select modes on the dash to create more sound,” Brake said. “And the other drivers disconnect their exhaust to make it louder. So, all told, it all seems to be louder out there,” he said.
Attorney Jules Olsman, a longtime city commissioner in Huntington Woods, said he’s hearing “a lot more of these engines revving and these motorcycles screaming.” Olsman said he hears objectionable noise on Woodward “as soon as I walk into my home office, which faces Woodward — I mean, if I’m wearing my hearing aids.”