wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Regarding today's (Oct. 19) segment on noise: I'm a typical New Yorker who walks or takes public transportation. I love music but I don't feel it's my right to force others to listen to music I enjoy. What's heard in subway stations is not only usually not to my liking, it is intrusive & TOO LOUD! (I assume that is so it can be heard above the noise of the trains, so it's a double-whammy) I'm being generous when I call the perpetrators musicians (anyone who has had to wait more than 5 minutes at a station learns that many musicians know one melody which is played over and over). Most of us cannot afford taxis so we have to endure drummers near the Union Square L train, salsa at 34th st & 42nd st. Chinese stringed instruments that sounds like cats being eviscerated -- all playing at painfully high decibel levels. Riding the trains, navigating busy stations at rush-hour, dealing with delays & unintelligible announcements is stressful enough. We should not have to deal with noise that is unnecessary and unhealthy.

nothing like chattering neighbors at all hours of the day in south brooklyn. how come some families never learned how to talk without screaming? not like they have anything interesting to say!

I founded NoiseOFF.org an online coalition working to raise public awareness and reduce urban noise pollution founded in Astoria, Queens (CB1 - ranked as the noisiest neighborhood in Queens).

We now have 800+ members across the country and parts of the world.

If you are sick and tired of the noise pollution in NYC, there is a better way.

It is important to emphasize that Washington Heights & Inwood had 10,908 complaints and ranked #1 because the new* residents of these neighborhoods are calling 311 trying to improve upon noise issues.
Having lived on both the Upper West (CPW) and East (92nd) Side, I was surprised to even notice any noise in my Inwood home which is across the street from Inwood Hill Park . But quickly realized that I had exchanged noises like the subway ( and buses, planes or people hanging outside bars) for the birds chirping and people hanging out in the park.
The point is: we live in a city. We will hear noise and our neighbors through paper thin walls, car alarms and will just have to deal with it the best way possible. If the goal is to hear no noise, then we have to move out to some completely isolated place in the middle of nowhere because even: "the burbs" make noise.
I do, however, have a lot of sympathy for the folks who live around Dyckman Street. I know it gets very noisy and congested with cars and motorcycles. But then again, I love having at least one COOL place with superb food and service in our neighborhood.

The East Village has been over-ridden by a swarm of locust-like sports-bars and college students that have zero regard for the local community or sound levels. Like smoke chimneys they congregate outside cookie cutter bars to puff, yell and scream talk over the din of traffic - paying no mind to the fact that people live, work, and have children to raise in their new self-entitled playground that was my old neighborhood.

Many of these young-adults attend NYU, and I wonder why this leviathan institution has taken no steps to educate their students. They should educate their students on how to be a FAIR guest in our city and neighborhoods with RESPECT to it's actual full-time occupants. PLEASE, NYU - EDUCATE YOUR STUDENTS ON HOW TO RESPECT WHERE WE/THEY LIVE. Yell and scream inside - not out. The street is not a dorm!

I get a lot of noise here in Kensington, Brooklyn but I don't mind most of it. The general sounds of traffic going down Ocean Parkway become like white noise, and not unlike the surf, but then suddenly you get some idiot who feels the need to open up and gun his motorcycle engine down the Parkway at 3 AM. That, and the sound of large trucks when they sputter to a stop and sputter again to a start, are my two peeves.
For the motorcycles, I'd say just enforce the speed limit on them (35 on the Parkway) and that would go a long way toward solving it, but I never see the cops stop anyone along that stretch though the speed limit is broken egregiously all the time.

I live in the East Village, near Houston Street and 1st Ave. The area is plagued with noise, the worst offenders being sidewalk saxophone players, who have decided that Ludlow & Houston St. is a great place to toot at 1 in the morning. Second worst offenders? Bar crawlers and college students, who can't seem to walk down the street without hooting and hollering. Car alarms? We get those too. Sirens? We've got them all: police, fire, medical, you name it. 311 complaints seem to fall on deaf ears at the local precinct.

Back-up alarms on buses and particularly construction vehicles; do they need to be heard 2 blocks away?
Aren't car alarms that are triggered by vibrations, illegal now? They go off when the owners have parked for the day by a train station and other parking areas. I never see police give summons for this invasive and maddening noise.
Thank you.

DUMBO - trains-construction- YUPPIES

Engine breaking!!!! Trucks on W 57th down shift and send a noise that moves like a wall of sound through my apartment. It sets car alarms off. I have leapt out of bed. This flagrant sound violation seems easy to enforce, or is it just me? Doesn't NYPD or DEP need the revenue?

I wrote words for that awful Mr. Softie song played in Wash Heights all the time:
"We're selling this crack in your neighborhood, but we'll just say it's ice cream." Even so, I love the Heights!

The most unnerving sound: motorcycles speeding at high RPM. It jolts me awake. There needs to be a special law against this.

I hear this when I stay by my parents house in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn