I don’t know if it is just my experience but I just don’t feel that anybody works anymore. We live on what was once a quiet residential “feeder” road to a couple of estates, that is not a through route to anywhere such that it would be used by holiday traffic. However ever since the end of the pandemic [EDIT -I should have said the end of the majority of restrictions imposed during the height of the pandemic], the volume of traffic going up and down what was a quiet road has increased disproportionately to generate tiresome levels of noise. This is at all times of the day, and days of the week and covers drivers of all ages but mainly drivers in their twenties and thirties, not just retirees. Some of the younger drivers just seem to roar around the neighborhood all day long and well into the night. If they are “working from home” they are taking the Mick, and if not, then God knows how they can afford the petrol to drive around constantly in high powered BMWs and Audis as they do
Has anybody else noticed this phenomenon or is it just me?
Perhaps a lot work from home now, on the estates you mention and get out and about when they feel like it.
Maybe there are shift workers there who have time to kill before or after work?
Possibly 16 year olds are now 18 years old and with a car.
I work from home, and do far more than I ever did when I used to drag myself into the City every morning.
Possibly as well, what you are hearing is the sound of delivery drivers on a tight schedule, because all this working from home has made next day/same day delivery routine.
I had some packages delivered and the driver was in a top end Merc, not an old van. So the gig economy is meshing with all sorts.
Seems like an argument in favour of the EV revolution, when the sound or roaring is replaced by a gentle whine.
Some fair points but I thought that most people were back at work now that the pandemic is virtually over and restrictions have been lifted. During the pandemic a lot of people were requested to work from home but the traffic was nowhere near as constant as it seems to be now.
Most of the noise is tyre noise, as it is with modern cars. EV’s won’t remove this type of noise pollution, in fact they may increase it as the cars will be heavier.
Many people dropped out of the labour force in the middle of Covid, perhaps close to retirement age having done many years of service and decided to call it a day, especially if firms offered redundancy. The UK has a high dependency ratio and this is probably worse than it’s ever been (see the ONS website if you want the data). And yet our retirement age for occupational schemes is just 55 (soon to be a still-young 57), so for those with a half-decent savings pot they can drawn down 25% of it tax-free and take the rest as taxable income from then on.
Culturally there has also been a shift, many people also decided to ‘reassess’ what they wanted from life in the middle of Covid, and the UK’s furlough schemes allowed them to build up savings and indulge this period of thinking about things. With the European workers all gone now, the jobs that have opened up don’t appeal to the English very much - cleaning, agriculture, construction, nursing etc. so many are still sitting reluctantly on the sidelines.
WFH for office workers has also stuck to a large extent, at least for a couple of days a week. And these workers have figured out that if you take away the coffee breaks and other distractions of the office environment you can be done in a handful of hours and then be free to do other things like drive around the place if that’s what you like doing.
Might this change? Well, we are certainly headed for a period of very low GDP growth. Citibank predict inflation of 18% in the UK, the Bank of England predicts 13%. If the latter decide to slow inflation by raising interest rates further (a dubious idea given so much of the problem is energy supply-related), then things are going to get very tight indeed for those with mortgages and loans. I suspect jobs will become less plentiful as companies retrench and those retirees will find that their savings pot does not get them the lifestyle they predicted anymore.
Might be a lot less BMWs and Audis buzzing around near you this winter…
So how do they fund their lifestyles? Just interested to know. I don’t want to get into politics here but as you say there are a lot of job vacancies in these types of vocations so why is there any unemployment? Is it because there is a generation of wanabee Youtube, TikTok stars and influencers who don’t want to do any work that involves graft.
Savings accumulated during the pandemic when many sat at home and got paid to watch Netflix
Persistent living with parents amid high rents and hard-to-access property market
(On the latter, worth reading Lionel Shriver’s ‘Property - A Collection’, there’s a very funny short story in it on a young chap whom his parents just can’t get rid of).
Unemployment in the UK is 3.8%, a lot of these guys are not even looking for work at the moment so they wouldn’t show up as unemployed. You need to be registered as seeking work to get into the data set.
I suspect though that this is already changing as time, inflation and reality eat up the accumulated savings and work has to be found again. If inflation does approach 20%, then any savings you have will have lost their entire spending power in five years’ time anyway (ignoring the effect of interest paid on it). Or a fifth in one year. So sitting around is not going to be an option for very much longer.
14 yr old Kia Picanto around here, packed to the roof lining some days
Never seen any high end German cars though, just vans.
We live at the quiet end of a cul-de-sac mostly retired but also have stuff screaming past the side road constantly, infact non stop. Then add the school traffic when they get back.
The Pandemic is not over; there is a new round of booster vaccination starting next week, with some, depending on stocks, receiving twin target Moderna. Homebound and some other groups will first be getting the call, then its rolled out to other age groups. Vaccination centres, while reduced in number, are still operational. There are still restrictions in place, and moreover, mechanisms to reintroduce restrictions as required. Most countries still maintain control measures at borders and crossings. What has ended is the first phase of the pandemic; which is the immediate health response to preserve life. We are in a post-peak phase, where outbreaks will still spike and remain a threat.
I never stopped working; just changed how I work. I don’t envisage ever being back in the office, unless I approve of a self-inflicted paycut. Judging by how the City looked last time I was there, for some special events 2 months ago, its not going back to how it was. Of course, I developed COVID-19 as a result of the special event.
Every Pandemic in history has left an indelible mark on human behaviour, ie. things will never return to the previous way of doing things. More recently, 1918 saw the development of distancing measures and a public health response. The 40 year Polio pandemic saw the emergence of Intensive Care as a new branch of medicine. The 1957 Pandemic saw laboratory science taking centre stage in the diagnosis of disease. 2022 will see the twin disciplines of data science and synthetic biology assuming roles in healthcare.
I know magazines will tell you that tyres are really really noisy, but I barely hear EVs. Rather noise pollution than toxin pollution. Scientists say EVs reduce noise pollution by 50% without accoustic alert, compared to cars, and 60% for light trucks and bikes. EVs are quieter than petrol/diesel cars.
Ok I stand corrected, the pandemic as such is not over but most of the original restrictions such as lockdowns etc are. I should have worded it that way. I think that most people understood what I meant.
In my experience most of the noise produced by modern cars is road noise produced by the tyres. If my memory serves me right, in the 50s, 60s and 70’s most of the noise cars produced was engine noise a fact not helped by relatively primitive NVH systems. They were shod with relatively narrow tyres that produced very little noise compared to the modern very wide tyres most cars have today. Surely you have driven behind a BMW X9 on the motorway to experience tyre noise that is something akin to a Vulcan bomber taking off, which drowns out most of the noise produced by your MX5. I appreciate that tyre noise can be very variable depending on the tread pattern and the type of road surface. My own observations are that for most cars, the tyre noise is more intrusive than engine or exhaust noise (unless it is a farting, backfiring, chipped BMW, Audi or such like). I can’t really see EV’s making such a difference to this, as they will need tyres with increased load ratings to cope with their relatively high weight. Anyway, that is a different discussion
I’m in a village and the old delivery tour buses and battered cars seem to end up delivering to the local farmers up their pot holed roads.
I suppose the apprenticeship has to start somewhere!
Lockdowns were part of a scaled response; they have been stood down so they can be stood up. Shops still retain a measure of restriction, such as the provision of safety shielding. Disease prevalence is still at about 2.5%, which is higher than at the beggining of the year, indicating the infection is still in circulation. But admissions are way down, and that is largely due to improved standards of care and the effectiveness of the first gen vaccines in preventing illness. But its still an EID, and there much to learn about it’s etiology. But anyhow, the Pandemic, whatever stage we are at, has left its mark. People will never go back to how it was. Its one of those moments in history, for better or worse.
So you have a combination of the kids you knew from 2 years ago can now drive, changes in how we buy food and foods, changes in how we work. Its not because suddenly the population is workshy.
You ain’t heard my MX5. To me, it downs out most of my surroundings thanks to a lousy twin exit MX5parts system.
I would suggest the data in that graphic is rather skewed for effect. Ignoring the Pop and Bang maps, which should be shot anyway, it used very advantageous comparisons. The article even says, electric vehicles emit no noise other than tyre and wind noise. So totally silent motors! Many ICE cars are very quiet and the 80dB is is saying for an average car, which is the equivalent of a noisy vacuum cleaner, is not the case unless the vehicle is traveling at quite some speed. I don’t walk down a queue of traffic and think the noise is unbearable. Tyre noise is an issue and I would suggest anyone who lives near any form of busy main road knows so. The hum you hear at night is tyre noise, not engines, which is why the EU is trying to reduce it.
The one thing that really annoys me about this thread is “the pandemic is over” I think a few people need to look up the definition of pandemic - it most certainly is not over.
Nor I.
We spend all day trying to spend our hard earned Pensions.
It’s a full time occupation in itself. Hard work I can tell you.
No promotion prospects though.
Just a rapidly approaching crematorium with funny music and purple curtains.
At least I’ll be hot again as I seemingly was in 1974.
I think the discussion is about noisy cars on a residential street not on a highway. Agreed that wind and tyre noise predominate at higher speeds, but at ~30mph, engine noise is more significant. Gerd Marberg carried out an excellent literature review for the Danish government, which is widely available. However, like a lot of similar studies, its quite old, being published in 2014, and some things have moved on since then.
A challenge, at the time of authoring, is that there wasn’t a standardised approach to measuring sound in the US and European studies identified. Anecdotally, the electric cars around my area, creep along very quietely. I don’t live on a motorway though.
A lot of them around here too, and probably all on PCP. Having spoken with several neighbouring owners, each with exclusively PCP electric his and hers, it seems they specifically do not want the long term cost liability of battery replacement and they also see current models as a stop gap until range is improved. (Small sample so not useful for a generalisation.)
They are a lot quieter than the “Yoof” of today walking and talking on their mobiles, but then so also are most of the recent petrol cars.
Modern “nano-energy” long-life tyres with high recommended pressures are exceptionally noisy especially on chipping surfaces. A friend and I recently compared our Mazda3s; identical except his mileage is much higher and he now has Rainsports on it, and they are so much quieter than the original Toyos mine still has.
However, even the expensive varieties of most diesels announce their presence in good time at any speed and on any surface.
I live on a busy road with a 40mph limit and a noisy surface, or at least I think its noisy, it got chippings thrown on it several years ago. An electric car passing will make just as much noise as a newer quiet ICE car in my experience. EVs are not going to make the roads quieter, or at least not without road surfaces that are themselves quiet.
On the subject of people working and being around to do other things I returned to the office after the first lock down and have for many years used the same NCP multi-storey car park. It has a 513 capacity over about 10 levels. It used to be full up to level 9, with a few on the top levels, on some occasions its filled right up. Since the pandemic and the return to work it’s now still well under half full, I would say perhaps 100-200 using it on a weekday now (same goes for other nearby carparks, its not unique) So a significant number of people here have simply not returned to work in the town centre, so perhaps generally their lifestyles are a bit less rigid now with working from home.
as I seemingly was in 1974.
