The loud pipes battle is coming to Toronto.
In tonight’s city council meeting, Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam is introducing a motion that asks the city’s Municipal Licensing and Standards to do something about noisy motorcycles. It also asks the province to ensure people are protected from excessive vehicle noise under Section 195 of the Highway Traffic Act.
You can read Wong-Tam’s motion here.
Will it go anywhere? Given the state of Toronto municipal politics these days, anything is possible, including a riot induced by angry one-percenters, backed up by infuriated dentists and acccountants who won’t be able to wake up the neighbours at 6 a.m. every morning as they rack their pipes to warm up their cruiser. However, it’s interesting to note the Toronto Star has thrown their weight behind Wong-Tam.
[…] As we told you Monday, councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam introduced a motion at this week’s council meeting that asked city council to find a way to deal with noisy motorcycles. Her plan was two-fold: First, she wanted the city’s Municipal Licensing and Standards department to address the problem. Second, she wanted the province to make sure their Section 195 of the Highway Traffic Act was protecting people from excessive vehicle noise. […]
I hope they are successful but it has to include cars and trucks intentionally modified to be loud.
It does, otherwise it will fizzle. I think they can get away with that sort of thing in Quebec, but it doesn’t fly in English-speaking Canada.
Remember, this is the same councillor who spearheaded a motion to eliminate free motorcycle parking in pay and display street spaces, because it fostered the dangerous practise of large motorcycles being ridden up onto the sidewalk to park. While I support a change to *Provincial* laws that codifies an actually enforceable standard for vehicular noise, you can expect anything that comes from this particular councillor to be knee jerk, ill conceived, and based on false premises.
Never trust anyone with a hyphenated last name.
I agree with TomN about “loud pipes saves lives is a crock”. What saves lives are the riders who are alert and aware of what’s going on around them at all times. Proper defensive riding, respecting rules of the road, keeping calm when situations get “heated”, being VISIBLE, wearing proper riding gear and having a high level of riding skill and not riding beyond your capabilities all help to save lives. The list goes on. Oh, getting rid of your ego too, helps. Loud pipes seem to have gone the way of “my dang-a-ling is bigger than yours”.
Think about it. How many times have you witnessed a situation where that “idiot” vehicle operator did not move out of the way for the approaching fire truck, ambulance or police car that had its sirens lit and horns blaring?
A few years ago I totaled up the distance I’ve ridden in Canada and the US over the years on many different motorcycles and it came out to around 40,000 miles. In all that time and distance I never felt the need to be a jerk with loud pipes.
So a great big “F*CK YOU” goes out to all the tiny-dicks who just had to put loud pipes on their Hardley-Ablesons and rice rockets. We’re now going to have The Man making life hard for EVERY motorcyclist just because you loud pipe clowns couldn’t behave like decent human beings.
well said
The problem isn’t the legislation as much as it is where the benchmark will be set. Will the law makers stick to factory levels or will they allow some wiggle room for performance mods? I agree that straight pipes with no restriction are way to loud for the street but where do we draw the line? The loud pipes saves lives thing is a crock as far as I’m concerned. There has never been a definitive study of it and my own test with buds who have bikes with loud pipes have shown that the noise isn’t noticeable until the bike is almost on top of you at which point it’s so loud that it tends to envelope you making it difficult to determine where it’s coming from and it’s too late to react to it.