The New York City borough of Manhattan is quietly installing “noise detectors” that will target loud vehicles and result in their drivers being issued with fines. Yet the advent of this new technology is raising the concerns of some social justice advocates who fear the noise detectors will “punish people of color,” as a recent article in the Guardian put it.  

Following tens of thousands of noise complaints this year alone, several Manhattan neighborhoods are installing cameras that will identify vehicles emitting excess noise and penalize their drivers. While concerns exist over whether this system will lead to discriminatory policing, its proponents argue it will uplift those who suffer most from sound pollution.

“Vehicles that emit obnoxious levels of noise in violation of state and city law have become a top quality-of-life concern for many New Yorkers,” the director of communications at New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, Edward Timbers, tells the Sun. “This technology offers some real promise in helping us to provide some relief for our neighbors.” The DEP is leading the initiative.

The system involves a sound meter that activates upon detecting noise of at least 85 decibels at a distance of 50 feet or more, at which point a camera captures the offending vehicle’s license plate. The department’s noise enforcement staff evaluates the footage and decides whether to mail a notice to the vehicle owner. Disciplinary action can be taken in the form of penalties or fines. 

Critics of the technology point out that it could target some ethnic groups that may be noisier than others. Yet at Manhattan, where only a fifth of residents own a car and many vehicles are taxis, Ubers, or commuter vehicles traveling in and out of the borough, it’s unclear how the technology would target any one group.

An assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University’s school of public health, Erica Walker, suggests that the technology could have discriminatory implications throughout the city. “There is a neighborhood where literally one side of the street is full of Mexican immigrants and the other side is Polish immigrants,” she tells the Sun. “Both have very different acoustical profiles. If you had to put one noise camera on this street, where would it go?”

The DEP is not disclosing the exact locations of the cameras, which will total 10 across Manhattan’s five boroughs in the coming weeks, Mr. Timbers says. “Locations are chosen from among those submitted by elected officials,” he explains, “and then on whether or not the camera will work for a specific location.”

Ms. Walker expresses concern over what metrics will be used to define loudness and who will make those calculations, pointing instead toward “poor urban planning policies” to address urban sound issues: “Noise cameras are very superficial. Noise issues in America need to be unpacked.” Ms. Walker did not respond to the Sun’s follow-up question on what, exactly, she meant by “superficial.”

“Nonsense” is how the director of the British company providing the technology responds to the suggestion that it would burden certain residents. “While it’s targeting people that drive aggressively and over-rev or modify their mufflers, it’s not targeting anyone of color in any way,” a director at SoundVue, Reuben Peckham, tells the Sun. “It doesn’t distinguish the color of the individual that’s driving the car.”

As for any concerns about privacy and surveillance, Mr. Peckham says that each device, equipped with three cameras and five microphones, only saves data to a web server when it detects excess sounds. “It’s recording all the time, but it’s also deleting all the time,” he says. “There is no surveillance unless you happen to offend.”

SoundVue developed this system a few years ago for an entirely different demographic than Ms. Walker suggests — aggressive drivers of supercars, like Porsches and Ferraris, who’ve been driving the wealthy residents of central London crazy by revving their engines in the middle of the night. Trials of the SoundVue system were conducted at various New York City neighborhoods in summer 2021 as part of the company’s mission to combat excessive vehicle noise, which is shown to adversely affect people’s physical and mental health. 

The founder and executive director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, Les Blomberg, tells the Sun that the SoundVue system “is the future of noise enforcement for mobile noise sources.” Mr. Blomberg’s group works to create more “civil cities” by reducing noise pollution. “The world is going to get quieter because of this,” he says.

The use of noise detectors will be less expensive and more efficient in the long-term compared to the existing noise enforcement operations, which require training teams of city employees to use the equipment, Mr. Blomberg says. By minimizing the risks of human error, he foresees that this system will actually curtail potentially discriminatory surveillance: “You’ve taken all the subjective elements out of the police officer’s hand.”

Quieting the roars of vehicle engines will help those in particular who are more likely to live in near busy streets and blaring highways: “The people you are protecting most with effective regulations would be the people we pollute most, which are people of color and people who are of lower income,” Mr. Blomberg says, citing U.S. Census data. The location of the detectors is one subjective aspect of the system, he says, but “that’s no different than any other police enforcement.”

The devices will hit city streets beyond New York. Miami has already implemented them and so will Sacramento, California, as additional states plan to add them pending approval by their legislatures. Mr. Peckham expects that amid trials in Israel and demand from Australia, the technology will go “worldwide.”

Noise pollution is indeed a worldwide problem. “This last decade has been the noisiest in the history of the world,” Mr. Blomberg says. “We never had as a species the ability to make a racket that we have right now.” 

The 20th century saw the rise of gas-powered motor vehicles now omnipresent in modern life. Yet with the advent in new technologies to deter raucous drivers and the growing popularity of nearly noiseless electric vehicles, Mr. Blomberg says, “there is huge potential for urban areas to be much quieter in the next century.”