How often have you experienced this?

It’s a mild summer night. All is calm. Families sleep with windows open to catch a fresh breeze. Suddenly — ROAAWWWWWR — a motorcyclist rips through the neighbourhood on a bike deliberately modified to produce a window-rattling shriek.

Its rider feels safe, claiming “loud pipes save lives,” but residents feel violated. Welcome to life in the city.

That’s changing in municipalities across Canada. A few years ago Edmonton passed an innovative bylaw, backed by spot-checks, requiring bikers to cut their noise pollution. Several other centres have followed suit. Now a welcome initiative is going to Toronto council on Monday pushing Canada’s largest city to do the same.

Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam wants municipal licensing and standards staff to report back on ways to crack down on excessive motorcycle noise. This would mark the first step in dampening the needless racket produced by booming bikes and deserves unanimous support.

There’s no good reason to allow motorcyclists with a taste for outrageously loud machines to continue inflicting their noxious din on a vulnerable public. Toronto’s health department has warned that frequent exposure to excessive noise can cause medical problems related to sleep loss and stress, as well as impaired hearing. Beyond that, it should be a matter of simple courtesy to spare a community from needless and ear-splitting disruption.

Too many motorcyclists don’t feel that way and persist in modifying factory-produced bikes, engineered to run fairly quietly, so that these machines roar rather than purr. Existing noise bylaws are difficult to enforce but Edmonton has the answer with special sound meters, spot checks and a $250 fine for offenders. The city’s motorcycle noise bylaw sets an allowable sound limit of 96 or 100 decibels, depending on the number of cylinders in a motor. That’s fairly loud, equivalent to a gasoline-powered lawn mower or passing subway train. But it’s not loud enough for those who favour deafening bikes.

Arguing that “loud pipes save lives,” they claim a noisy motorcycle is better noticed by drivers and thus reduces accidents. But there’s no evidence for this.

Some allege discrimination against bikers, as a group. Yet the law does no such thing. It only targets noise polluters. Motorcyclists with appropriately quiet bikes are free to ride as they please.

Others hostile to the noise bylaw note that motorcycles are just one source of racket in the city. Urban quiet is routinely shattered by ambulance and fire-truck sirens, construction noise, revving car engines and ridiculously loud music systems.

It’s true — but some of this noise is necessary. That’s not the case for excessively loud motorcycles, which figure among the worst offenders. Cracking down on them seems an excellent start in reducing noise pollution in Toronto.

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