Laying on the horn doesn’t help anyone. (Photographer: Debrocke/ClassicStock/Archive Photos via Getty Images)
One morning on a recent work trip to the German city of Leipzig, I found myself with time to kill, so I left my hotel with no plan beyond meandering through the city center, which dates to medieval times. I turned left or right whenever an intriguing storefront, building or park caught my eye.
There turned out to be plenty to see, including the St. Thomas Church, where Johann Sebastian Bach lies buried, as well as a monument commemorating Leipzig’s role in the peaceful collapse of East Germany in 1989. In one square, a construction crew was setting up for a wine festival; nearby, a bagpipe-playing busker in a kilt drew a crowd of bemused onlookers.
But what I found most striking about Leipzig’s historic core was not a presence, but an absence: There was no car noise at all. Instead of squealing brakes and rumbling engines, I heard café chatter and chiming clock towers.
A website supported by the German government explains why that was the case. In the 1990s, Leipzig’s leaders wanted to do something about its car-clogged city center, which was “almost at a standstill.” The result was a low-traffic plan for the area that diverted vehicles to surrounding roads, giving more street space to people walking and biking.
With cars now nearly absent from Leipzig’s downtown, my stroll was strikingly free of noise — and also delightful, as I enjoyed the thrill of a place that was both vibrant and quiet. I ended up wandering the streets for hours longer than I had planned (and spending more money, too).
Leipzig’s downtown pedestrian zone draws shoppers and strollers in 2021. (Photo: Peter Endig/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Although still rare in North America, car-free and car-light neighborhoods have grown common in Europe, established in cities like Paris, Brussels and Pontevedra, Spain. Boosters often tout the improvements in air quality and road safety when street space is used for sidewalks, bike lanes and outdoor public space instead of transporting and storing motor vehicles.
By comparison, the removal of “the roaring traffic’s boom,” to borrow Cole Porter’s phrase, garners scant attention. But its upside is very real. Apart from an occasional jackhammer, the urbanist adage really is true: Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud.
Don’t just take my word for it. Researchers have found that about half of urban noise is attributable to motor vehicles. In some places the share is higher, such as in Toronto, where traffic produces about 60% of the background din. And silencing that cacophony can lead to flourishing street life — in North America as well as in Europe.
Consider what happened in October 2019, when New York City banned private cars from 14th Street, a major Manhattan thoroughfare, with the goal of speeding up bus services and reducing crashes. The move was hugely controversial at the time, and a group of nearby residents filed numerous lawsuits attempting to block it. They ultimately delayed but did not kill the project.
When the changes to 14th Street finally went into effect, the city’s predictions proved justified. Bus trips did indeed speed up, and crashes fell. (Despite some residents’ fears, the amount of traffic on adjacent streets barely budged.) But few seemed to anticipate what seemed to be the most popular aspect of a transformed 14th Street: the tranquility of a car-free roadway in the midst of the City That Never Sleeps. The New York Timesdescribed “a quiet that was almost eerie,” where no one “heard a single honking horn.” Others dubbed it “ The Miracle on 14th Street,” and local officials promised to replicate the policy on other city roadways.
Perhaps because it happened just before the Covid-19 pandemic brought a far more unnerving and widespread spell of urban silence, that success story has now been largely memory-holed. But the unexpected jubilation that followed the removal of 14th Street’s cars suggests an American inability to even conceive of the pleasures of quiet streets. At least on this side of the Atlantic, car noise is an immutable urban fixture, something almost impossible to imagine being without, a bit like David Foster Wallace’s classic joke about the fish that grow flummoxed when asked “How’s the water?”
It takes truly extraordinary sonic assaults to make drivers draw enough attention to warrant official sanction. Think of the “Belltown Hellcat,” the 21-year-old Seattleite who managed to infuriate an entire city by gunning his modified Dodge through late-night streets and then posting videos of his exploits on social media, in defiance of law enforcement, city officials and frazzled neighbors. (the driver was arrested and barred from posting on his social media accounts.) Left unpunished are the instigators of more commonplace irritants — decibel-blasting motorists who bombard neighborhoods with revving engines, explosive exhausts and sound systems that go to 11.
Recognizing the social costs imposed by obnoxiously loud machinery, London and Paris now deploy automatic noise cameras that snap pictures of vehicles when they break maximum decibel thresholds, with a ticket mailed to their registered owners. The idea has started to catch on in the US, too, with New York City and Knoxville, Tennessee, experimenting with it.
But noise cameras address only the most egregiously amplified cars and trucks; they do nothing about the background babel that is ever present in urban America, the kind that requires people to raise their voice when chatting on the sidewalk. Nor can such devices mitigate the relentless clamor endured by those living adjacent to arterials and freeways. As far back as 1981, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that nearly 100 million Americans were regularly exposed to traffic noise of at least 55 decibels, enough to cause health problems.
Such ongoing noise exposure can have deadly consequences, such as increased risk of stroke, hypertension and heart attacks. A growing body of research has separated the health effects of car noise from vehicle emissions, and its findings are ominous. According to the World Health Organization, excessive noise from motor vehicles “can disturb sleep; cause adverse cardiovascular, metabolic, psychophysiological and birth outcomes; [and] lead to cognitive and hearing impairment.” A 2022 United Nations report concurred, saying that traffic noise of 60 decibels "is enough to raise heart rate and blood pressure and cause a loss of concentration and sleep.” In Denmark, a multiyear study of 2 million people aged 60 and over found that fully 11% of dementia diagnoses could be attributed to roadway noise.
As with so many other environmental hazards, those living in low-income communities across the US are at particular risk, with background noise typically two decibels higher than in more affluent areas, according to a 2017 study . This is by design, as planners have sited countless highways, airports and other high-volume infrastructure in disinvested neighborhoods. A paper from last year found that urban neighborhoods that were subjected to racially discriminatory redlining practices decades ago still experience louder noise today.
Looking to the future, the ascendance of electric vehicles offers a partial solution to noise pollution — but with an emphasis on “partial.” EV motors are quieter than gas engines, but at speeds over 35 miles per hour (56 kilometers per hour) car noise comes largely from friction between tires and pavement, which electrification does not mitigate. (And then there are the battery-powered performance vehicles designed to broadcast fake engine noises just as deafening as their gas-powered predecessors, which is a whole other issue.)
Cars drive past a noise barrier beside the highway in the Zuffenhausen district of Germany in 2022. (Photo: Marijan Murat/picture alliance via Getty Images)
There are technical ways to dampen background vehicle noise, such as erecting highway barriers that block sound and using asphalt designed to muffle tires rolling over it. Policies can also mitigate specific aspects of car cacophony. Lima enacted laws against unnecessary honking in an effort to silence the Peruvian capital’s famously exuberant drivers; Israel banned loud car alarms. But the foolproof fix for urban vehicle noise is a simple one: Do as Leipzig has done, and limit, or eliminate, the cars.
To be fair, in many US neighborhoods, car noise is probably there to stay. Decades of car-centric planning have made it difficult to imagine many urban neighborhoods — or even streets — in the South or Southwest ever banning private cars, as has become common in Europe. But there are still plenty of neighborhoods in older cities of the Midwest, West Coast and Northeast that predate the automobile, where one could realistically imagine oases of car-free calm.
Were traffic to be tamed, the resulting quietude could stimulate business activity, attracting people from elsewhere to visit the neighborhood and compelling them to linger (and shop) while they are there. That said, no one should expect small-business owners to sound a clarion call for car-free streets; they are often staunch defenders of car access, and studies consistently show that they overestimate the share of customers who drive, undercounting those who walk, bike or take transit.
That is a shame. The packed cafés I saw in Leipzig suggest that businesses thrive when streets are free from car noise. Indeed, restaurateurs could see particular gains from quieter streets: One academic study found that even low-volume traffic sounds diminish the pleasure of eating.
Tastier meals would seem just one of many ways that quieter, car-free streets can make urban life more appetizing.