A noise camera (on the right) equipped with microphones to detect unusually loud vehicles and cameras to pinpoint the source, is installed on Berlin's Kurfuerstendamm boulevard on June 8, 2023.JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images
Ingrid Buday, founder of the group No More Noise Toronto, says her launch into pro-quiet activism came during the pandemic, when the emptier-than-normal streets near her west-end home started to sound like a nightly drag race.
The whine of racing motorcycles and the growl of illegally modified mufflers, echoing off nearby underpasses, left her so sleep-deprived she was unable to return to her job in IT as COVID-19 restrictions were lifted.
Her organization, founded as a Facebook group in 2022, aims to make the city a quieter place, taking on all kinds of noise – overnight garbage trucks, nightclubs and concert venues – but pays special attention to needlessly high-volume automobiles.
“I’ve lived in the same place for 12 years,” Ms. Buday says. “And even pre-pandemic in 2019, I heard the backfiring and the farting cars and I was like, what the heck is this?”
Having pushed for changes as Toronto recently tightened its noise bylaw, she is now urging her city to follow the lead of some others around the world, including Berlin, Paris, New York and one borough of London, which have tested or deployed newly developed “noise cameras.” The devices typically use microphones and computing power to pinpoint revving engines, snap photos of offenders’ licence plates and automatically issue fines.
Several companies have developed similar technology. The cameras in use in New York, which has installed 10 since 2021, are marketed under the brand name SoundVue and were developed by a British company called Intelligent Instruments.
Ms. Buday arranged for the British acoustic engineer behind these cameras, Reuben Peckham, to meet with Toronto city officials and interested members of the public in early December at City Hall. In an interview, Mr. Peckham explained that the devices were born of a system of microphones he and his firm originally developed to monitor the hum of large wind turbines.
The local council in the posh Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London approached the company in 2019 to develop a gadget to crack down on the late-night revving and racing of high-end performance cars in the neighbourhood. The noise cameras’ debut, not surprisingly, made headlines.
New York came calling soon after. It has passed new noise laws and has committed to deploying five cameras in each of its five boroughs by the September, 2025. The system nails loud drivers with a US$850 fine for a first offence and US$1,600 for a second. There are also SoundVue cameras now being tested or used in Miami, Sacramento and Philadelphia and projects in Dubai and Sydney, Mr. Peckham says.
He explains that a main microphone detects loud sounds, those at 85 decibels in New York’s case, and then four secondary microphones, spaced two feet apart, pinpoint precisely which car is guilty, by measuring how long the sound takes to hit each mic. (It cannot detect conversations or other low-level sounds.)
The system then activates its video camera, capturing the licence plate just as a red-light camera or a speed camera would. Artificial intelligence helps calibrate the microphones, but the camera footage is reviewed by humans for accuracy. SoundVue cameras cost about US$30,000 each, plus US$5,000 for software.
The idea isn’t new. Edmonton piloted different noise monitoring systems from 2016 to 2020. A 2020 phase of the project cost $192,000. But according to reports to city council from Edmonton bureaucrats, but the project was abandoned after the cameras could not reliably trace which car produced the racket.
The City of Toronto, over the course of the last year, implemented revisions to its noise bylaw that include a limit of 92 decibels – around the level of a power lawn mower at 1 metre away – for all idling vehicles, not just motorcycles as was the case previously. Engines above idle are limited to 96 decibels, measured 50 cm from the tailpipe. Fines are set at $500.
Traffic on Yonge St. near Front St. in downtown Toronto on Nov. 4 2019.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail
While electric cars are much quieter, a typical gas-engine sedan can register 60 to 70 decibels. Traffic noise on a busy highway can easily top 80. Ms. Buday, who owns her own noise monitors, says the worst offending cars with modified mufflers usually pop above 100 decibels.
Health experts, including Toronto Public Health in a 2017 report, have long warned that noise levels common across urban areas are not just annoying but measurably harmful, disrupting sleep and causing higher rates of heart problems and other health issues.
However, Toronto’s moves to enforce its new rules have been patchy at best, Ms. Buday says, pointing to three joint blitzes by Toronto Police and municipal bylaw officers in the summer, which saw 20 vehicles inspected and just three tickets handed out. Letters were also sent in September to licensed garages warning them that “muffler cut-outs, straight exhausts, gutted mufflers, Hollywood mufflers, bypasses or similar devices are prohibited under the Highway Traffic Act.”
But the city’s bureaucrats have so far not recommended that city council pursue the idea of new-and-improved noise cameras. The city says before any such devices could even be tested on Toronto’s streets it would need changes to the provincial Highway Traffic Act.
Plus, explained city spokesman Shane Gerard in an e-mail, the technology on offer is “not yet fully automated.” He says Toronto will keep monitoring its progress in other cities.
Ms. Buday plans to take her pleas for noise cameras directly to the province. She also partly blames the province for the increase in noisy mufflers, as Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s cancellation of the province’s Drive Clean exhaust inspection program for non-commercial vehicles in 2019 ended a regular inspection of exhaust systems for most cars, making modifications easier.
And some models, such as the Ford Mustang, Ms. Buday notes, now even offer factory-installed optional “active exhaust” systems that allow drivers to open a hole in their muffler and growl away at the touch of a button.
Long-time New York City anti-noise campaigner and psychologist Arline Bronzaft, a professor emerita at the City University of New York, admits her city’s new noise cameras are just a “drop in the bucket,” in the face of a growing noise problem.
But she argues that even a small number of cameras can act as a deterrent – and as a sign to the victims of noise pollution, whom she says often feel ignored, that the government is doing something: “The noise cameras should give people some hope.”