Following numerous complaints made to Gale Brewer’s office about excess noise coming from the West Side Highway, two noise cameras will soon be installed at unspecified locations within the Upper West Side.
These cameras will be installed by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which recently sent Brewer’s office a letter approving her request.
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In terms of where this noise comes from, “Many of the issues are the result of illegally modified car mufflers,” the DEP explains. Â
The noise cameras are “paired with a sound meter and activates when the meter detects a noise of at least 85 decibels from a source at least 50 feet away.” The video captures the offending vehicle’s license plate, DEP reviews the evidence, and the car’s owner gets a notice to appear in the mail.
First time penalties are $800, second offenses are $1,700, and anything further will result in a $2,500 fine.
A pilot program launched in other NYC locations in June 2021, and more are expected to be installed this year.
While the exact locations of the forthcoming cameras have not actually been disclosed, DEP’s Beth DeFalco acknowledges that the technology has flaws – and that installation locations must be chosen extremely carefully.
“We learned lessons during the pilot,” her letter to Gale Brewer stated. “One camera was picking up noise from trucks on a nearby highway and had to be moved further away. Another camera would take a picture of cars in multiple lanes – making it difficult to discern which vehicle was committing the offense. While we have found them to be an effective tool, cameras are not right for every location.”Â
Upper West Side drivers who like to crank their music on a factory car radio probably won’t have too much to worry about, because their decibel limit is typically much lower than 85.
The cameras are expected to be installed by the end of August.
About time. Too many punks drive around their modified bucket of bolts
It’s also often motorcycles, and if you can read a license number , good luck. Because they usually don’t have one.
That is ridiculous. This city is in a serious money grab
Your comment is ridiculous. Quality of life issues like these being addressed is a great thing (if it actually works). Money talks – if you get fined that much money, wouldn’t you fix the issue?
So be it! At last these attention grabbers may incur a consequence that’ll grab their attention. And if the fines, finance more of these noisy sentinels, so much the better! BTW electric vehicles can’t come soon, enough!
While you’re at it, you might want to ticket the Academy and Peter Pan buses that decide to take the highway instead of city streets out of town. If they were supposed to be using the WSH and the HHP, they would have built those roads to accommodate vehicle 5-10x the size and weight of the average honkin SUV.
This is a good step, but ambulance sirens are a much worse and more frequent noise problem throughout the city. They are too loud (particularly the FDNY ambulances) and sometimes used in non-emergency cases (such as taking those with limited mobility to physical therapy). The frequency of ambulance runs in NYC is insane, it’s many times that of other cities. Our great first responders should have full freedom to do their jobs, for which we should all be grateful, but steps can be taken to make it less noisy.
In general it is good to cut down on obnoxious noise in the city. However, many perpetrators seem to have obscured license plates to prevent automated ticketing. We need more enforcement around that.
Please also place cameras at 72nd Street and Broadway, where buses, cars, motorcycles and trucks often gun their motors and ambulance and fire engine sirens are twice as loud as they need to be. Thousands of pedestrians are slowly losing their hearing.
Thank you.
W72 str my good old neighborhood
I wonder why Ms. Brewer has focused on this and been able to make this arrangement, when she has failed to do anything on a much larger issue which impacts every pedestrian in the city — the failure of motorcycles, motorbikes and motor scooters to stop at red lights, to drive the wrong way on one way streets and even sometimes to drive on sidewalks and in bike lanes. The elderly and the disabled (vision, mobility and hearing) in particular have a hell of a time crossing the street safely when they have a walk sign, and not be hit,/hurt/killed/maimed. So now we cross in fear of injury or try to avoid being out in the streets at all. The laws about this — just like the noise laws on an acceptable level of decibels — already exist and simply need to be enforced. The longer this situation is tolerated rather than firmly halted, the more the law will be violated and the more this illegal conduct will become ingrained in our city. Yet, the politicians and the police are supine. Every day I see police cars sitting there with the police ignoring the illegal conduct taking place right in front of them. So why is Ms. Brewer not accomplishing anything on this, where is the Mayor, where are the local police, and especially the Police Comm’r? People in this city are getting more and more angered by this. Wake up!!!
Amen, though you forgot bicyclists. As long as they can kill a pedestrian and are already subject to the same traffic rules/laws as cars, they need to be held accountable. But good luck with that, since registration on these and other vehicles doesn’t seem to be an issue.
This has been my pet peeve for years. I’m a motorcycle rider. The problem is not motorcycles, it scooters – electric and gas powered. They are by law required to be registered, plated and insured. If any of these ever crossed over into Nassau or Westchester, they’d be stopped and impounded. The New York City Police Department does NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. And yes, bicycles on sidewalks, scooters on sidewalks, running against the traffic and passing red lights, no enforcement at all.
Instead of worrying about the West Side Highway, they should be doing something about the motorcycle gangs who regularly ride up and down Broadway at night doing wheelies and riding illegal and otherwise bikes with loud, illegal mufflers. How about all the large electric and gas powered scooters, in actuality small motorcycles that have to be registered, plated and insured, that are running around this city unregistered, in plain view. Many of them are used to commit crimes and muggings and cannot be traced because the cameras cannot pick up a plate. The police do absolutely nothing. They can pull up in front of a police car and the police do nothing. BTW, I don’t hate motorcycles, I’ve been riding them for fifty years.
Sirens don’t bother me at all. What is annoying are motorcycles and punks driving cars with modified mufflers so they make as much noise as possible. That should be ticketed big time and must not pass the inspection.
I’m in Queens and live on a main street. I live near a hospital and I don’t mind the ambulances. What i want to scream about are the Hatzolah ambulances that sound like there’s an air raid (fire engines make less noise) and their unmarked cars who are just as loud. Not to mention e-bikes, motorcycles, e-scooters and what I call farther cars (I think you know the ones I’m talking about). AND cars blaring non-English music after midnight.
Sara, your not-so-subtle racist comments are not welcome here and certainly do not represent the cultural make-up of the UWS.
I do see that “ilovequeens.com” is for sale. Have at it.
Hatzalah ambulances are no louder than the ones from Mt. Sinai or Lenox Hill or SeniorCare, etc. The ones that are demonstrably louder are FDNY. Loud enough to wake the entire contents of Greenwood Cemetery.
There was a bill in City Counsel (co-sponsored by Helen Rosenthal IIRC) to make ambulances change their sirens to a two-tone European style system that has been tested and found to be less annoying (and I agree). A few Mt. Sinai ambulances made the switch but the bill seems to have died. Would love to revive it; any improvement is better than nothing. I’ve written to Gale Brewer’s office about this but gotten no response.
Nice pile on of xenophobia, Archie.. “Hatzolah”, as if other ambulances aren’t just as loud, and “non-English music” as if English-speaking music is dispensed in a whisper? Maybe you should consider Larchmont or New Canaan?
Pretend it’s a city.
If you wanted quiet, move to Muncie, IN.
I suppose some of these people are they type to move in near an airport and then complain about the airplane noise. ?