“Is Santa Monica too loud? Who’s making all the noise?” Here are your responses:
■ “I don’t know who is making the noise, but I know what is making the noise: Leaf blowers; lawn mowers; motorcycles; police, fire and ambulance sirens; trash-collection trucks; loud car stereos and mufflers; construction; airplanes flying in and out of Santa Monica Airport; kids on skateboards; auto horn-blowing; and an inebriant who staggered out of a bar on Wilshire Boulevard recently at 2 a.m. and shouted “Hee Ha” two times at the top of his vocal range.” ■ “I don’t think that Santa Monica is too loud. I don’t know where everyone hears all these noises. The only time I hear any noise is when I walk on the Promenade. Where I live, or where anyone else lives, in Santa Monica, I don’t hear any noise. I don’t know what everyone is talking about.” ■ “One example of too much noise in Santa Monica are the musicians who are currently playing outside of the Johnny Rockets Restaurant on the Third Street Promenade. One of the charms of Johnny Rockets is their ’50s-style music that plays inside, and these musicians clearly interfere with that.” ■ “There are a lot of planes in the sky, day and night, in Santa Monica, especially those little ones. You can really hear them.” ■ “Santa Monica is too loud. I think it’s especially too loud on the Third Street Promenade where you have performers with amplifiers blasting music out. Sometimes people want a little peace and quiet.” ■ “I think the City Council did a good job in turning down the noise ordinance. It was Draconian and would have affected a lot of the bars and clubs unfairly, for example, the Gas Lite in Santa Monica. I want to say kudos to the City Council for not letting the noise ordinance through.” ■ “Urban noise has been around since about the 13th century. Would you think that the Cathedral of Notre Dame was not built by all those stone masons working away and annoying people in the urban environment? The same thing applies today to auto body shops and merchants who must make noise in order to be in business. It’s just part of the urban environment. I would say that Santa Monica does do a good job regulating the noise is does give off. The Santa Monica Airport has the best noise-reduction program of any airport in the nation.
If we do implement a noise ordinance in Santa Monica, we should model it after LA’s, rather than drafting our own from scratch.” ■ “First of all, the amount of helicopters that fly over the city contribute to the noise problem, especially the news helicopters — the helicopters that fly 100 feet above the beach — and the police helicopters, which do nothing. Also, motorcyclists who rev their motors and go about 60 mph up your street. Last, is those oversized car stereos which you hear going “thump, thump, thump” at 2 a.m. waking everyone up.” ■ “Santa Monica has overgrown to such a large extent that I don’t think that anything can be done about the noise level. The worst contributors are those vehicles with those dreadful, nerve-racking back-up beepers, the police and ambulance sirens – which sound like WWIII is going on all day in Santa Monica — and the noisy motorcycles. Something should be done about those. They roar around our city day and night. All I can say is ‘heaven protect our hearing and our sanity.’”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 5, 2003. Read the original PDF.