That can be arranged.

And you read this lease to be able to so definitively say he "had no legal right to be there"?

> He was not the tenant and had no legal right to be there.

Is anyone saying that the tenant didn't want him in the apartment? Otherwise, I'm pretty sure you're allowed to have guests over to your apartment.

Think you're going to turn on your heat for this?

>You’re also ignoring the $7,500 income tax credit that comes with the EVs.

You mean the one half the manufacturers aren't eligible for? The one that still requires someone to front the money, and have a federal tax liability high enough to claim the credit against? Those are significant stumbling blocks for a lot of folks.

>You will find a $30K Equinox EV when it launches

I don't believe it.

I don't mean to argue, but that's just not true. Look at the list you gave...

A Bolt is a compact hatch, while a Malibu is a full size sedan but still $1k cheaper.

A Mach-E starts at $46,000 after a price reduction last week. An Explorer starts at $36k, and an Edge starts just under $38k (which is interesting, I would have thought an Explorer would be more expensive).

The hypothetical $30k Equinox is more than the $26k gas Equinox.

> These days an EV isn’t any more expensive than a new gas car.

I'm not sure that's true, but also......toooons of people can't afford a new gas car either.

Absolutely! The natural (as opposed to forced) proliferation of electrified vehicles can't come soon enough! We are improving, but I think we especially need to support cheaper EVs for lower income people. It's a rich-get-richer kind of situation where the wealthy person is saving money on gas after buying an expensive EV, while the less well off person is getting drained at the pump.

I appreciate our commitment to green energy generation as well, and again feel like we can and should be doing even better.

Okay I think this conversation has run its course; now it feels like you're just arguing about anything, maybe to distract from your initial claim you've been able to provide zero scientific (let alone, logical) support for, and I'm not really interesting what you're talking about now.

> the ability to stop one via making a complaint with the license plate number

Has that worked for you?

> Is your solution having more police or is there some magic solution to enforcing a law already on the book?

Not more police, better managed police. Get them out of their paramilitary training camps and back to doing the work that actually helps the people.

Hey /u/communitynoiselab I am glad to see you joining in! It would be great to post your work on /r/providence and /r/RhodeIsland as you publish...clearly it's a topic we all care about!

I have a question here that you may be able to help with.

Is there any research out there that compares the health effects of constant, lower-volume sounds like the rush of a highway vs. intermittent louder sounds like sirens, loud cars and trucks, leaf blowers, etc.? My intuition is that the louder intermittent noise would be worse, but my intuition has surely been wrong in the past so it would be great for an actual researcher to set me straight!

> You can look at research showing that low level decibel levels cause health issues, the article I sent you shows how low exactly it can get and still cause problems.

> If the sound is constant it will always be causing problems where as a single loud noise is intermittent. The frequency alone means things like illegal mufflers are less polluting than a highway full of many vehicles.

I don't think that's sound logic (hah, no pun intended). Do you really think your quality of life would be greater if you had a perfectly silent home except I came by and blew an airhorn once an hour, as opposed to a home with a 60dB white noise machine running 24/7?

> A low constant hum can cause problems and has no protections against through enforcement. Meaning it causes more health problems.

Wait what? You think that your body somehow knows which sounds are legal and illegal, and only accepts damage from the legal ones...?

> A muffler ranges from 100-120 decibels, that takes 5+ minutes to cause damage. I doubt the car is revving their engine in front of your house for that long and if so its probably your neighbor.

As I said in the previous comment, physical hearing damage isn't the issue. It's sleep disturbance and stress related maladies we're talking about.

> Why are you trying to solve a problem that already has a solution? Enforcement is a police issue and cops in Providence are notoriously bad at their job.

I'm not sure what your point is. The cops suck, so I should just give up hope of anything related to them ever improving?

> As for fully capping the highway that sounds like a fantasy with how RI invests in infrastructure

Yeah probably, but I can still prefer an ideal solution over a realistic one, can't I?

>you cut a huge chunk of the noise even without the full enclosure

But also lose out on a ton of other non-noise-related benefits.

Just an idea - could you experiment with takeout from your favorite restaurants to find the best way to freeze and reheat their food? It seems conceivable at least that you could end up with a better ready-made lunch that way than a meal that's built to ship.

> Also by capping do you mean just putting up sound barriers around the highway or are we talking a sort of fully enclosed system?

I think fully enclosed would be amazing, with greenspace, walkways, bikeways, and I suppose a couple car roads on top. Reconnect the sides of the city, while sequestering the traffic on the highway that's just passing through.

> Shows that road traffic exceeding 60 decibels cause health concerns. Other research papers (idk which ones, google probably has it) give you break downs of how long it takes for hearing damage based on decibel levels.

You are talking about two different things. No one is saying that 60dB highway sound is going to cause hearing loss...the problems there are disturbed sleep and stress-associated things like cardiovascular issues. I'm also not saying that the hypothetical loud vehicle is causing hearing damage either (at least, not to the person in their house). What I am positing is that the sleep- and stress-related issues seem like they would be worse with louder, intermittent noises, but you're saying that it's actually the quieter, constant noises that are worse, which is what I am trying to learn more about. This study you linked still does not support your claim about effects of types of noise. I am beginning to think that maybe you just made it up, or stated your opinion as scientific fact because you believe it to be true, but I would like to re-emphasize that I am trying to learn more. I might be wrong, and would love to have some reliable source that allows me to update my opinion.

> if you want to do a big St Patricks day thing, go to Newport.

Hah yep, it's either a fantastic or a terrible place to be on St. Patrick's depending on who you are

I want to make sure you're not misunderstanding my point or putting words in my mouth...I'm not saying the highway is awesome and we should let to go unchecked.

I'm saying that a bunch of sources of the most annoying sounds can be solved like today, for free. Capping off the highway through the city (which seems like a good idea to me), will take like 20 years and billions of dollars.

It just seems logical to start squashing the quick and easy sound pollution rather than just twiddling our thumbs and hoping that DOT scrapes together the money and support for a PVD Big Dig.

>https://www.cirrusresearch.co.uk/blog/2020/04/4-different-types-noise/

Thanks for the link, but that doesn't support what you said about low constant noise causing the biggest health problems, it's just categorizing types of noise. I'm looking for a comparison of what types of sounds cause what types of complications like you referenced earlier, so I can update my opinion to match reality if necessary.

Sounds good to me, I'd be happy to subsidize mass transit even when I'm not a frequent user. It benefits us all.

> If you look into what causes health issues from noise pollution you will find that it is continuous or constant noise

I did look into it, and that's not what I found. Can you please help me out and share your source so I can learn more?

> The issue is a "constant low drum" is what causes the health issues.

Source? I am not finding anything with that phrase you quoted, nor other places that differentiate between constant and quiet and loud and intermittent noises. There is a lot of focus on sleep disturbance and hearing loss, which seems to indicate occasional and loud noises, but I'm not seeing them broken out specifically. But you clearly have read more than me, can you share where you're getting your conclusion from?

> You can also look into Japan's 40ish year fight with highway noise and making efficient panels to reduce a major source of sound pollution for any more information.

Are you implying that Japan hasn't done anything to curb loud exhausts, and instead focused entirely on normal highway noise while letting people run around without mufflers willy-nilly? That doesn't seem right, but again...maybe you know something I don't.

> if all the other noise goes down one outlier is tolerable.

Idk, I guess it's a matter of opinion, but I'd much prefer the constant, quiter, hum of highway traffic over an occasional blast of a car going by with open headers.

> Just because that's the one that annoys you doesn't mean it's the most prevalent or the most damaging one

Are you positing that quieter, constant sound is worse than occasional louder ones? Is there science to support that? Or are you just saying that we don't know what's worse, so we shouldn't even attempt to curb the already-illegal noises by enforcing existing rules?

> someone trying to get their car to the shop after their catalytic converter has been stolen

First of all, I'm pretty sure catalytic converter theft is illegal, so that still stems from an enforcement issue.

Second, I think we both know that people zipping up and down residential roads late at night aren't just trying to hobble their broken car to a shop.

I am not seeing details about it publicly, but I had them do a sound survey at my place, and the meter was here for a full week. I'm not sure if that's a phase 2 to this project or what though.

Edit: here's some more info on what I participated in:

> Multiple times a week, Nina Lee finds herself in a Rhode Islander’s backyard. She unpacks and then assembles an environmental noise monitor and begins recording. A week later, she’ll return to the site, collect the monitor and store the data for future statistical analysis.

https://www.brown.edu/news/2022-08-30/lee

The article says that results are expected to be published ~Fall 2023

>Did they actually do any measurements?

Yes:

> To gather data on noise pollution in Providence, Brown students canvassed 180 city locations near interstate highways, construction sites, health care centers, schools and parks to collect 5-minute noise readings, day and night, using research-grade sound level meters. The accumulated samples — which totaled 720 sound level measurements from across the city — allowed students to generate a community noise map and produce a report card, rating neighborhoods by noise.

https://www.brown.edu/news/2022-12-11/providence-noise-pollution

Thank you! I appreciate you taking the time.

Oh gotcha thanks.

If you would indulge another question, what urban plan is going to eliminate the sound of illegal mufflers? Seems like those will echo anywhere as long as they exist.

I'm not sure I follow, you're saying that the Community Noise Lab at Brown’s School of Public Health is untrustworthy because they're in bed with the police or something?