I don’t know where to put this, cars and motorcycles, health and fitness, or living in Taiwan, because it covers all three.
Every few minutes there’s very loud scooters driving by. They’re extremely loud, especially for their size. Is there anything we can do to fight back against this? I’m pretty sure the modifications they do (and it’s probably not even expensive or hard to do) is illegal as hell as there are likely noise requirements for any road legal vehicles.
And these are all 100-150cc scooters, normal scooters, that are about 70 decibels when you gun the engine, but the ones I hear drive by of the same displacement looks to be at least 100 decibels.
I can’t be the only one who is losing sleep and having diminished quality of life because of these, so why aren’t we (as a community) fighting back against this?
I really don’t like when people make their tiny bikes or awful cars loud. It’s not like it’s a Lamborghini with a beautiful sound. It’s just a complete annoyance to everyone else. Idk how they think it sounds good.
I’m sure you’re not alone. I can’t think of how many thousands of residents around Taipei wouldn’t want to be woken up by loud ass scooters or cars at 3am.
And I’m sure there’s a law against this. Question is, why aren’t Taiwanese fighting them, pressuring the government to do something?
Which law? Typing “Taiwan noise law” into Google and reading through the results might tell you.
You’re Taiwanese, so maybe you could explain - why aren’t you doing anything, like pressuring the government to do something? The others who aren’t doing anything might also not be doing anything for similar reasons.
There are laws but they are never enforced. Cops won’t do anything unless they are incentivised. Politicians won’t do anything until the people complain enough. Give the coppers the fine for adulterated noisey mufflers and the problem would dissappear over night.
They do get enforced, they put out sound traps and you get a fine in the post. But like the speed cameras the locations are posted on group chats so they then just use another street until it’s gone.
Got it. But that’s too cumbersome of a process. Loud vehicle? Pull em over. Modified muffler? Document with camera and ticket. Cop gets money problem solved.
The ticket won’t hold up if challenged, even if it’s blatantly over the limit (they have different limits for different sized engines). They need a decibel meter that has been calibrated, same as you can’t get a ticket for speeding without documented evidence of the speed.
So it sounds like the technological solution actually works, then – the noisy offenders do in fact stop making noise on the street with the noise trap, as long as the noise trap is in service.
The problem sounds like it’s too expensive or burdensome to keep the noise traps in constant operation in a sufficient number of locations. This could be a business opportunity for a tech entrepreneur – make a cheaper version of the current system, that can be deployed easily to many locations and kept in operation with low maintenance costs for months or years at a time, and sell the new system to the police/government.
How hard can it be? A calibrated decibel meter, a camera, and some trigger to take the picture and upload it to a server. For power, maybe a solar panel and batteries could work. Would need a SIM card for Internet access to the server. Each device could report its health to a central server, and any devices that fail to report would be marked for maintenance, so that a maintenance crew can go out and fix the non-responding devices. There are a lot of things to consider, but it seems feasible.
Here’s some information about the current system, from 2017.
Vehicle need to be impounded, if it continues license/registration is suspended. Even if they have rich daddies I think even Terry Guo will get tired if they have to buy their son a new car every 2 weeks because it keeps getting impounded (not to mention the loss of face).
Need to figure out how the heck to report this. It’s particularly bad on the street I live in, loud ass scooters go by every few minutes.
I really hope they ban gas powered scooter and only allow electric. Those are dead silent.
They are and there are, but like speed cameras they need to be calibrated to be enforceable.
I dislike the loud screeching scooters as much as the next person but the enforcement needs to be fair, just relying on some coppers judgement leaves it open to all sorts of abuse.
I think the portable speed camera would cost the same price, you will also need some sort of distancing device as sound dissipate over distance, and a way to single out the exact source of the sound from any other noise. I’m not sure how the ones work they have now, could be if you get caught you have to go for inspection or they have a specific area that’s covered by a directional mic.
Most of the time your sent for inspection and its 3 bolts to change it back to original, then they just change it back after.
Just go to the local police, they will tell you what to do.
Can they put some charging stations in the mountains because one of the places I stay a lot it would be over 1 hour round trip to the nearest charging station (home charging is not an option).
It would take mere seconds to calibrate any electronic device. Most are now continuously automatically calibrated. So you’re not just relying on “some coppers judgement”.
Just give the driver an inspection ticket. This is what they do with smokey vehicles. This will remove the police from the testing process completely. I’m sure we can think of a million reasons to make it complicated though. Complex and expensive equipment equals more for certain people.
How about a repeat offense with a documented modified muffler equals an automatic fine? It would be documented because the police recorded the muffler when they were pulled over.
Hmm…let’s think of some more reasons why we can’t do this.
for each vehicle that they ticket.