Q: My question concerns noisy motorcycles. It is a great irritation to me when I hear loud motorcycles on the streets or the highway. I believe that most cities have noise ordinances. Why aren’t they enforced for motorcycles? Any light you could shed on this question would be appreciated.
A: There’s that scene in Back to the Future when Marty McFly and his band compete at a battle of the bands. Twenty seconds into the song one of the judges picks up his megaphone and cuts them off, saying, “I’m afraid you’re just too darn loud.” If only it were that easy to put an end to excessively loud vehicles.
In an effort to be thorough in my research I downloaded an app that measures sound volume. And then I immediately used it to see how loud the seagull on my neighbor’s roof was squawking. The ambient daytime noise level in my neighborhood hovers around 40 decibels. When that bird would squawk the needle jumped up to 50 decibels. As a refresher from high school science class, the decibel scale is not linear. Moving from 40 to 50 decibels isn’t a 25 percent increase; ten points on the decibel meter equates to a ten-fold increase in sound pressure.
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