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Dear Noise Project Supporter,
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You received this message because your submission to the Noise Project's Community Noise Survey indicated that motor vehicles are a prevalent source of noise near your home. We recently created a Vehicle Noise working group as part of our efforts to address mobile noise in the city. If you would like to volunteer to help, use our Contact page to send us a message with the words “vehicle noise” in the subject line.
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According to a recent survey conducted on behalf of Mayor Brett Smiley’s administration, 40 percent of Providence residents said they are dissatisfied to some degree with the general lack of respect for noise ordinances in their community. And that sensibility is further borne out by the 5,600 noise complaints the Providence Police received in 2023 in all of the wards in our city.
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Among the most often-cited sources of noise according to the Noise Project's community Noise Survey and contact forms are non-compliant mufflers, which are either inadvertently damaged or deliberately disabled or designed to produce more noise, and over-amplified car stereos, which involve packing vehicles with extensive — and expensive — equipment to blast the city as they drive around.
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Yet of the 5,500 noise complaints Providence Police received in 2022, as documented in a late 2023 Providence Journal article, the police issued only 19 citations in response — for the entire year. But of those scant citations, two were for non-compliant mufflers and 10 were for excessively loud music.
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We all know the city could issue 12 citations for those causes on any given night in Providence. Clearly, the city needs to take more action to address these mobile noise sources, which unlike some sources can be heard throughout the city both day and night.
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At the beginning of his second year in office, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley announced his interest in joining Newport as the second Rhode Island city — and multiple U.S. cities such as Chicago, Miami, New York City, and Knoxville, TN, and around the world (London, Paris, Barcelona, and others) — to explore the deployment of what are known as “noise cameras”.
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These are like speed cameras, except instead of connecting a camera to a radar gun that measures a vehicle’s speed, they use a microphone to measure the sound level it emits. If the decibels exceed Providence’s legal limit, the camera takes a picture of the license plate to enable the city to issue a citation for violating noise regulations.
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Before the city can install the noise cameras, however, Rhode Island state law needs to be updated to add noise measurement to the legislation that currently allows speed, red-light, and license-plate reading cameras. House Bill 7368 — Automated Traffic Violation Monitoring Systems: Noise Limits will allow communities to use this technology to address the challenges of enforcing sound regulations and reduce excessive noise in our community.
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On Tuesday, March 12, at approximately 4:30 p.m., the RI House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee will hear testimony on H-7368 in the House Lounge at the Rhode Island State House on 82 Smith Street. We ask Noise Project supporters who want to do something about vehicle noise to please either submit written testimony by e-mail by 4:30, or attend the hearing and testify in person. Here are some talking points that you may want to include:
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- Tell them about your experience of vehicle noise in Providence — how often you hear it, what time of day, how it disrupts your sleep or other quiet enjoyment of your home (including outside), and the most prevalent sources you hear. (Bear in mind that noise cameras only target sound from moving vehicles in the places they’re deployed, so if your neighbor’s car is the vehicle noise you hear most, noise cameras won’t help that.)
- Noise cameras are not meaningfully different from the speed, red-light, and license-plate cameras already deployed on Providence streets. Monitoring for excessive, unhealthy, unnecessary, and illegal sound levels does not represent a qualitative change in the current use of technology in motor-vehicle enforcement.
- Noise cameras allow the city to deter illegal sound-level limits without needing to divert or add additional law-enforcement officers to enforcement duties, and thus represent a low-cost solution to a long-standing and demonstrated enforcement need.
- Any concern about potentially biased enforcement by law-enforcement officers is alleviated by the use of technological means — noise cameras don’t identify vehicles until they are triggered by excessive sound levels, so no human bias (such as the driver’s appearance, or the type of sound it registers) enters into the decision to capture vehicle license-plate information.
Rhode Island residents who care about vehicle noise need to show their support for the new bill and the technology it permits by:
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We appreciate your support for new technology to address noise in the city, and for the Noise Project's other efforts to make our community a quieter and healthier place to live and work.
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“Noise is the new smoking”
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