Loud Cities, Quiet Streets

TL;DR;

• Chronic traffic noise above ~53–55 dB isn’t just annoying; it measurably increases the risk of heart disease, poor sleep, and cognitive problems.¹
• Most “loud city” soundscapes are really “loud car” soundscapes. Cities like Delft show that rerouting, slowing, and reducing cars makes big places surprisingly quiet.
• Design tools like 30 km/h limits, porous asphalt, quiet tram-and-bike streets, and noise maps can cut traffic noise by several decibels.
• Horns reveal the cultural gap: drivers honk through insulated cabins, while cyclists with car-horn-loud Loud Mini horns tend to use them sparingly for genuine emergencies.

“Cities aren’t loud. Cars are loud.”
— Not Just Bikes, “Cities Aren’t Loud, Cars Are Loud” (YouTube, 2021)²

1. Loud cities are a public-health problem, not a personality trait

We’ve normalized the idea that “cities are noisy,” as if it were a quirk of urban personality—like good coffee and bad landlords. But when you look at the research, the story is much darker: traffic noise is a chronic environmental pollutant with clear, measurable impacts on our bodies.

The World Health Organization’s environmental noise guidelines recommend that long-term exposure to road-traffic noise stay below 53 dB Lden by day and 45 dB at night to avoid increased risks of cardiovascular disease and serious annoyance.¹ These levels are not especially quiet; 50–55 dB is roughly a calm conversation at home. The bar is low—and we still fail it.

Across Europe, more than 110 million people (over 20% of the population) are exposed to transport noise at levels the European Environment Agency classifies as harmful, mainly from road traffic.³ That exposure is estimated to cause around 66,000 premature deaths per year, plus tens of thousands of cases of heart disease, diabetes, depression, and severe sleep disturbance.

Recent meta-analyses go further: transportation noise (especially from roads) increases the risk of ischemic heart disease, heart failure, and stroke, adding up to at least 1.6 million healthy life-years lost annually in Western Europe alone.⁴⁵

And it’s not just heart disease. The American Public Health Association now explicitly classifies noise as a public health hazard, linking environmental noise to hypertension, metabolic disorders, mental-health impacts, and impaired cognitive development in children.⁶

So when we talk about “loud cities,” we’re not talking about an aesthetic preference like “I don’t like neon.” We’re talking about an invisible risk factor on par with air pollution and second-hand smoke.

2. Cars, not cities, are the real noise machines

If cities themselves aren’t inherently loud, where does the sound actually come from?

Most environmental noise in urban areas is dominated by motor vehicles—not people talking, not bikes, not the occasional tram bell. The main ingredients are:

• Propulsion noise: engines, exhaust systems, cooling fans, and braking.
• Rolling noise: the hiss and roar of tires interacting with pavement, which actually dominates above ~50–60 km/h.
• Impulse noise: horns, sirens, and the occasional “look at me” exhaust blast.

Not Just Bikes illustrated this in Delft and Amsterdam: a quiet gap in traffic sat around the low 40s dBA; a single cyclist registered roughly mid-50s; a passing car jumped into the 70s; SUVs and vans a few dB higher; and modified motorcycles blew past 100 dBA. At that point, one vehicle is tens of times louder than the background and can be heard across neighborhoods.

Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, a 10 dB increase is perceived as roughly a doubling of loudness. So that “small” difference between 65 dB and 75 dB is the difference between “irritating background” and “this conversation is now about the truck going by.”

Critically, the people causing most of this noise are often insulated from it. Modern cars have good soundproofing, so a driver sitting behind a 110 dB horn hears a much softer “blip,” while everyone outside gets the full blast. It’s an asymmetric relationship: the noisemaker is protected; everyone else absorbs the stress.

That asymmetry matters for behavior.

3. Noise makes us worse to each other

Noise doesn’t just rattle our ears; it changes how we behave.

Psychology and public-health studies find that chronic noise exposure raises stress hormone levels, worsens sleep quality, and increases irritability and aggression. Laboratory and workplace studies show that loud, uncontrollable noise makes people more likely to act angrily and less likely to help others.

One classic field experiment in San Francisco (summarized in the urban-design book Curbing Traffic by Chris and Melissa Bruntlett) found that residents on louder streets were:

• Less likely to speak to or assist strangers.
• More likely to cut conversations short, act impatiently, and report feeling agitated.

Noise erodes trust and generosity—the exact social glue that makes dense cities livable in the first place.⁷

Combine that with car-horn culture and you get a feedback loop:

1. Drivers move through the city in a protected capsule, externalizing both risk and noise.
2. When anything slows them down, the horn becomes a tool not just for safety, but for expressing frustration.
3. That blast raises stress for everyone within earshot, nudging the whole street toward irritability and conflict.

The horn isn’t the only culprit, but it’s a very literal embodiment of “my convenience is more important than your nervous system.”

4. What quiet cities actually sound like

The good news: “loud city” is not a law of nature. It’s a design choice.

Dutch cities provide a particularly vivid counterexample. Starting with the Noise Abatement Act (Wet geluidhinder) in 1979 and subsequent environmental-noise laws, the Netherlands embedded noise limits into planning.⁸⁹ New or altered roads, or new housing near busy corridors, must be checked against noise standards, and if limits are exceeded, authorities are required to take mitigation measures—speed reductions, quieter pavements, barriers, or even road re-routing.

Cities like Delft then stacked multiple strategies:

• Traffic circulation plans that push through-cars to the edges and keep the center as a low-traffic zone.
• Car-free or low-car squares and streets, like Delft’s Markt or Amsterdam’s tram-and-bike boulevards.
• 30 km/h default speed limits on most urban streets.
• Quiet pavements, especially porous or rubberized asphalt on higher-speed links, which can reduce road noise by 3–6 dB (and even more in some pilot projects).¹⁰

In Delft’s historic core, you can literally hear the difference: birds, bells, soft conversation, and the occasional tram—sound levels more like a library than a downtown. Yet these spaces still move enormous numbers of people, by bike, on foot, and by transit.

One of my favorite examples (borrowed from the Not Just Bikes video) is an Amsterdam street with only a tramway and a wide cycle path. It quietly moves as many people per hour as an eight-lane arterial, without sounding like one.

A quick cheat sheet: how to make a “loud city” quieter

Each row isn’t magic on its own. But together they turn the soundscape from “permanent highway” to “city where you can have a conversation across a café table.”

5. Horns and culture: why cyclists honk differently

Horns are a really useful way to understand how design and culture interact.

A typical car horn is around 110 dB at close range—a level that can startle, disturb sleep, and, with repeated exposure, contribute to hearing damage. Yet because drivers are insulated, the social cost is externalized.

On a bike, things work differently.

If you mount a car-horn-loud device on your handlebars—like the Loud Mini from Loud Bicycle—it’s your own ears that take the hit. Cyclists are fully exposed to their own noise, so blasting a 120+ dB signal at every minor annoyance would be miserable.

That shows up in how people actually use them:

• Google reviewer Stewart Swain describes the Loud Mini as having “literally saved me from a few close calls,” and reviewer Ed Sallade says he “could not imagine riding without it” because it cuts through driver inattention when it matters most.¹¹
• A user on r/bikecommuting writes that their Loud Mini is “solely for… emergency situations; if a car is turning and is about to hook me, [or] run a stop sign because they didn’t see me.”¹²

In other words, the same sound that’s abused in cars as a “get out of my way” device becomes, on a bike, an oh-no-this-could-kill-me tool.

That’s not because cyclists are morally superior; it’s because:

1. They feel the blast themselves.
2. Their default travel mode—on a narrow vehicle that can often maneuver around obstacles—doesn’t incentivize honking to clear lanes.
3. Their main safety problem is being ignored by drivers, not being delayed by others.

So if we want fewer hostile honks in our cities, the answer isn’t “ban all loud horns” and leave cyclists defenseless. It’s to change the baseline:

• Design streets so that people walking and biking rarely need to do anything dramatic.
• Make it obvious when drivers are intruding into space where they don’t belong.
• Reserve car-horn volume levels for true emergencies, not everyday frustration.

When most people moving through a street are on foot, bikes, or trams, you still get plenty of mobility—but you don’t get the constant soundtrack of rage.

6. Building loud cities that sound quiet

Putting this together, the path forward is surprisingly clear:

1. Treat road noise as pollution, not background. Set local goals aligned with WHO guidance (≤53 dB Lden from road traffic) and publish noise maps that make hotspots visible.
2. Shrink and slow car traffic. Prioritize 30 km/h limits, traffic circulation plans, and serious enforcement over cosmetic noise barriers.
3. Invest in quiet capacity. Trams, buses, and high-quality bike networks can move freeway-scale volumes of people at library-level sound.
4. Use materials intelligently. Deploy low-noise pavements and targeted barriers where speeds must stay higher.
5. Reframe horns and sirens. Regulate unnecessary honking and loud exhausts, while recognizing that exposed users—especially cyclists—may need rare, high-impact signals for emergencies.
6. Protect quiet pockets. Parks, squares, and even small side streets where you can hear your own footsteps are not luxuries; they’re public-health infrastructure.

Urbanist channels like Not Just Bikes and books like Curbing Traffic have done a great job of showing what this looks and feels like on the ground: stepping out of a central train station into a space where you hear conversation, bicycle bells, and the rustle of trees—instead of eight lanes of vroom-vroom.

If we stop blaming “the city” and start blaming the actual machines that are too loud, the solutions become obvious. We don’t need quieter people. We need quieter streets.