shel

The Transsexual Chofetz Chaim

Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.


I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.


I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock


Website (RSS + Newsletter)
shelraphen.com/

there's a website called How Loud that analyzes how noisy different addresses are (when standing outside the property, purely on urban geography, it doesn't take into account things like double pane windows or architecture) and something i feel so smug about is that many suburban addresses actually end up being substantially louder than addresses in the inner city because the primary source of noise is cars and so more car-dependent communities will end up with lots of loud wide arterial roads with heavy car traffic all times of day whereas in older cities with narrow residential streets you actually might not be able to hear non-emergency vehicles very often at all.

so a lot of people decide to move to the suburbs because "it's quieter" and then... don't even get quiet out of it. I've lived in both rural and urban areas and my current apartment in the inner-city is actually the second most quiet residence I've held. Because the rural addresses were off of arterial roads in car dependent areas. After all, the residences that are more affordable in suburbs and rural areas are going to be the ones by arterial roads... because nobody wants all that noise!


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in reply to @shel's post:

I've lived in both and I generally agree except emergency vehicles are loud as hell, and so's construction, and so's the occasional hostage situation with cops yelling at a dude at a loudspeaker at 5am (that one happened in Brooklyn). So ambient noise is indeed not that bad, but the spikes are (depending exactly where you live in a city) loud and frequent.

looking it up, it seems like the apartment i live in now, the house i just moved out of, and the house i grew up in all have exactly the same noise rating (70). for the two in Philly it's mostly from local sources, and for the house in the suburbs it's all from traffic. it was only a few blocks from an interstate. the current place is definitely louder inside because of upstairs and downstairs neighbors, but i also can't hear any traffic at all from my room, ever

the loudest place I've lived, where i could barely sleep for the first few months living there, was a 9th floor apartment directly above I-95 in new york, which has a 48 sound score (i guess lower is louder)

I live fairly centrally in a major city and, yeah. at night when nobody's driving around it's basically silent. with my windows open right now, 9am, i can hear the occasional vehicle and a bit of low background car noise and a bunch of birds. possibly it's quieter at night than the rural place i grew up simply due to lack of owls

Whenever I’d hear people complain about city noise, I always had this inkling that it was less about the actual ambiance of the city, and more a dogwhistle (lol) for their thinly veiled racism towards things like hearing music coming out of open windows or cars, or the general hustle and bustle of urban life. While I’ll cede that hearing emergency vehicle sirens is a common background feature of urban life and is kinda annoying, I can’t imagine that’s the sort of thing they’re actually crying about.