Cannot Stomach the Purposely Modified Cars with Loud Exhausts Anymore

Hello all,

I do not mean to seem like I'm ranting but this particular issue has been on my mind for months and months and I've never had any courage to confront it

In my area there are a significant amount of purposely modified cars with loud exhausts. It has got to the point where there is 90% chance I will encounter one whilst I'm outside

Every time one passes I get an overwhelming sense of despair and anxiety, and naturally, anger. They severely stress me as it takes a long time for my tinnitus to settle, even if the noise is for a matter of seconds. My day will be ultimately ruined and it affects my mood and work

I'm enourmously anxious to leave my house now for fear of these episodes happening, I come to here for any advice you could generously offer as I'm sure this would be partly the case for some of the users here.

Many thanks in advance,
Wreni

 

Hi @wreni, I hear you there, I have an issue whereby, if i am walking , and the road is to my right, any vehicle passing from behind sounds as if it has mounted the pavement( sidewalk if you are in the states or other country that uses the alternative) and is heading right for my backside,, my reaction? I find myself swerving hard left to avoid a collision!! it doesn't help that my vision is not exactly good either.

 

this isn't just a tinnitus issue; urban noise across the board is stressful and makes people feel bad, even if they're not consciously aware of it.

walking outside in pretty unreasonably loud and polluted urban zones used to make me crazy, so I moved into the woods (25 miles from the closest thing resembling a city, which is still only 90K people). Just bought a house even deeper in the woods, minimum 5 miles from any state roads and triple that to a freeway.

it took me ~5 years of effort to set my life up in such a way that I could walk away from the city and be done with it, but it was absolutely worth it. In the mean time, work on managing stress.

 

Out of curiosity, how do you get phone & internet access? Satellite?

 

Nah; I work from home full time doing software stuff, so reasonable internet is a hard requirement. Despite being near the end of a dead-end road in a 1000 person town, I can get 100mbit cable. I'm in one of those civilized liberal states, though

There were some houses we looked at that were cheaper and beautiful with as many or more acres than what we bought, but they were satellite or DSL only. I looked into this pretty hard; DSL is just terrible across the board, and satellite is really expensive, still pretty bad bandwidth, and the latency makes it more or less impossible to do two-way video streaming, so that's out.

 

@wreni
I also live in a big noisy city, and ride the subway to work which is the noisiest part -loud horns on platforms etc..

just use earmuffs (Peltor x series) or plugs - that is the only option if you have sensitive ears

I had a 8 cylinder car and a large motorcycle both with loud, modified exhaust back in the days and it was fun

I refuse to live like a hermit because of T

 

I agree, and didn't want to give that impression. I grew up in the woods and was never happy in the city, so moving back to the woods is just my life process. I go out on a regular basis, ride motorcycles, shoot guns, etc.

I'm glad I don't like cities, though -- besides causing hearing loss and increasing your cancer risks, your life expenctancy* gets worse with time spent in urban zones. This, despite more car accidents and less access to ER resources in the countryside...


* this one is at pains to express that the gap is narrowing, but also calls out higher rates of obesity and smoking in the country despite a still-longer expectancy. So, reading between the lines, healthy living in the county is where you want to be from a math & stats perspective.

 

Interesting - I wonder why there would be more car accidents in the countryside. It seems counterintuitive to me, as I was imagining that accident frequency was somehow positively correlated with traffic density.

 

Higher speeds on two lane highways.

I grew up in a rural area. Minor fender benders rarely happened. When car accidents did happen, they were often very serious or even fatal. When I was only 17, I used to drive about 30 miles a day to go to school on country roads and highways. Weather conditions could really impact those roads, too. Local snowplows can’t always keep up with keeping all of those roads clear.

 

Yes that makes sense. The severity of accidents being higher is fairly intuitive to me. The volume however wasn't, but I have no reason to disbelieve it.

 

Even before I got tinnitus those cars annoyed me.

 

I feel ya... especially now when guys like to get them (de-)tuned to make the gurgling and popping noise. I never knew backfires and early detonation were so cool... it's not.

 

The astonishing thing, are the people complaining the electric cars being too quiet! I recall someone (I believe it was @JohnAdams) posted about the company then adding the option of loud sound mufflers!

 

I’m not surprised, people don’t realise how harmful loud sounds can be until they face hearing problems themselves. I used to abuse my ears on dozens of metal concerts for 20 years without hearing protection, only because I was not aware about the consequences, there were no public awareness campaigns in my country at all. My father who is 80 and is 80% blind complains about electrical cars being dangerous for him since he almost fully relies on his ears crossing the street.

 

Yep.

 

This is our season for Cicadas, which amazingly are the loudest insects in the World; that unique, screeching sound is the male's mating call.

I have often thought that young men who operate very loud "muscle" cars and motorcycles do so for the same purpose (one guy who drove a new Corvette Stingray swore that in the summer carloads of girls would actually follow him).