If the city decides to electronically crack down on loud mufflers, it should not follow the road it did with red light cameras.
New York City, Knoxville, Tennessee, and London have installed cameras with microphones to catch motorists and motorcyclists whose vehicles exceed legal noise limits. As the Sun-Times’ David Struett reported, Chicago is considering going that route with a downtown system that could go into operation next year. The next step is to bring it before the City Council’s Public Safety Committee.
At times, especially after dark, downtown neighborhoods can be victims of ear-splitting noise because some motorists and motorcycle riders like to modify or cut off their mufflers to make their vehicles exceptionally loud. That can be jarring for people living in a crowded urban area.
The Illinois Vehicle Code prohibits modifying “the exhaust system of a motor vehicle in a manner which will amplify or increase the noise of such vehicle,” but some people say police don’t crack down sufficiently.
Yet an automated system should not evoke the days when red light cameras generated spurious tickets for people who either had to pay or take time to contest the citations. Tickets for overly loud mufflers should be issued only when there’s no doubt of a violation and who committed it.
The push for electronic monitoring grew out of work by eight community leaders who simply want quieter streets, and that, not a cash grab, should remain the focus.
The target of the crackdown is not people on their way to a muffler shop for a repair. Rather, the ordinance would be aimed at vehicles that can be heard from as much as a mile away, resounding in the canyons of Loop skyscrapers and along Lower Wacker Drive. All that noise, which can damage people’s hearing, is unnecessary.
“Clearly, when people cut off the exhaust pipe and go up and down the street and around the block in a high-density neighborhood, you have to conclude they are simply vandals,” Craig Kaiser, head of Streeterville Neighborhood Advocates and a member of Noise Free America, told us.
The proposed system would triangulate the source of an excessively loud muffler and capture video of the vehicle, including its license plate. The system should be designed in a way that nobody is dinged for ordinary traffic noise or for being too close to a vehicle with a tampered muffler.
Mufflers modified to create a din have no place in a city. Police and the City Council should work together to put a cork in them.
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