Stop the motorcycle noise, please
Mt. Woodside resident Ed Munro brought a complaint of motorcycle noise to
council, pleading with them to look into all measures to muffle the problem.
He stated that “platoons of 25 bikers” at once come rumbling down the Lougheed Hwy, “in excess of 120 decibels.”
He said provincial laws aren’t doing anything to deter motorcyclists from operating at high noise levels. Many bike owners, he said, are known to not only chop the muffler off but to add megaphones to increase the noise.
“It’s incredible these people have hearing at the end of their joyride,” Munro said.
He asked council to look at what Kelowna is doing about the issue. But CAO Wallace Mah said that while Kelowna did look at muffling the noise through a bylaw, that bylaw seems to have stalled at its third reading back in 2011.
Munro said that regardless, there must be a way of stopping the noise.
“In Britain, they are very hard on them,” he said, and the result is quieter bikes. “When I was a kid I like making a lot of noise, but now I’m old and I don’t like it much,” he added, laughing.
In order for a motorcyclist to be ticketed for an excessively noisy engine, a police officer would need to have a proper decibel measuring system available on the roadside.
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