Did they ban car alarms?
Let's start with banning car's first ;)
cars*
Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
71–80 of 149 posts
Re: Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
#72Maybe it’s just me but I wonder why western countries don’t implement noise limits for vehicles with sirens in residential areas (fire trucks, police, ambulance etc.).
It always felt to me unnecessarily loud.
Re: Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
#73honestly i don't get the point of leaf blowers, you move the leaves with an extremely loud gasoline powered machine from one place to another for what purpose, to make it someone else's problem and then they can blow them back?
It boggles my mind too, I always see these workers blowing leaves for HOURS in my street, you'd be more efficient with a rake, while using 0 gas, and producing 0 noise. Even from the workers perspective, you're just sitting there next to a two stroke engine with no emission filtering the whole day, that can't be good for your lungs. Same thing for removing temporary paint strips or killing weeds, they burn liters of propane slowly moving 50 meters per hour, the best part is that they're often two or three workers per burner, one holding the flamethrower, one pulling the gas tank, one pulling the half melted paint strip. Last time I saw them using a bulldozer to scrape a 10cm wide road paint strip... the amount of energy wasted is insane, we're truly living as if gas was free, unlimited and without side effects
Re: Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
#74I live in a very leafy area with a lot of deciduous forest cover, so we're no stranger to leaves. I have never understood leafblowing. It seems like such busy work. It's not hugely common here but I have seen people carefully shepherding leaves into little piles on pathways, battling against the entropy of a light breeze. I'm sure there's a good reason but it always just seems like the ultimate expression of man trying to conquer nature in every way
Re: Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
#75I live in a very leafy area with a lot of deciduous forest cover, so we're no stranger to leaves. I have never understood leafblowing. It seems like such busy work. It's not hugely common here but I have seen people carefully shepherding leaves into little piles on pathways, battling against the entropy of a light breeze. I'm sure there's a good reason but it always just seems like the ultimate expression of man tryi…
I agree. Rake is far easier to get bulk amounts in autumn.
Leaf blower is still pretty useful for keeping things tidy, but I’m still embarrassed to use my battery one.
Re: Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
#76honestly i don't get the point of leaf blowers, you move the leaves with an extremely loud gasoline powered machine from one place to another for what purpose, to make it someone else's problem and then they can blow them back?
I always saw people acting like game NPCs blasting a single leaf for what seemed like forever trying to get it into a specific spot.
I'm not convinced leaf blowing is faster than raking. I'm not even convinced it's faster than picking up leaves by hand.
Re: Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
#77Maybe it’s just me but I wonder why western countries don’t implement noise limits for vehicles with sirens in residential areas (fire trucks, police, ambulance etc.). It always felt to me unnecessarily loud.
I don't now where you live, but there seam to be drastic differences between countries. These vehicle do have an in-city and out-city loudness. Also here they tend to have the siren off most of the time and only turn them on immediately before an intersection.
Re: Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
#78I live in a very leafy area with a lot of deciduous forest cover, so we're no stranger to leaves. I have never understood leafblowing. It seems like such busy work. It's not hugely common here but I have seen people carefully shepherding leaves into little piles on pathways, battling against the entropy of a light breeze. I'm sure there's a good reason but it always just seems like the ultimate expression of man tryi…
They ruin the look of the lawn you have put 1,000 hours of work into this season.
Re: Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when you work in gardening half the time is cleaning (leaf blowing, hedging and mowing) How much of this is just to make things look nice, as opposed to actually functional?
It is, if anything, anti-functional: unless it smothers everything the litter provides nitrogen and nutrients as it decomposes. Getting rid of all the litter for that “perfect lawn” requires re-introducing nitrogen artificially (historically lawns would be grown with clover, the clover being a nitrogen fixer for the grass, that stopped being a thing when people started widely applying broad-leaf herbicides like 2,4D,…
100%, like cutting grass, all the stuff you cut and move out of your lawn is nutrients leaving your soil, do that long enough and you'll get dead soil, then you'll need to buy compost... which is made from the leaves, grass cuts and bio trash that you city charges you to collect. It's a perfect cycle really.
> the lawn industry then labelled clover a weed to make killing it a goal rather than a negative side effect
People who are into bio gardening/farming use cover crops to boost soil fertility and avoid weeds, very often clovers actually. You can even use them as cover crops while growing other things, again to compete with weeds, every know and then you cut them down, leave them on the spot, they decompose and feed your crops/earthworms
Re: Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Zürich, the worst offender is the outdated two cycle moped. Sadly, not much is being done about it because of the cult and retro status of these things.
At the Gold-coast the worst offenders are the Bugatti, Lotus and Ferrari leasers...how is it legal to be that loud??
Is it? Police do charge vehicle owners that have modified there vehicles, because they are now too loud.