Quiet, Please: New York’s ‘Noise Cameras’ Are Listening

New York City is known for its noise. A cacophony of sounds bombards residents every time they step outside — screeching subway cars, jackhammers drilling away, late-night revelers leaving bars and clubs.

Still, roughly 50,000 noise complaints are filed every year with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection by New Yorkers who have become fed up with the commotion, according to a department spokesman. Thousands of additional complaints are handled by other city agencies.

The noise generated by vehicles, including cars with modified mufflers, loud motorcycles and drivers who honk excessively, accounts for only a small fraction of the complaints the department receives, the spokesman said, but it’s the target of a new tool intended to turn down the city’s volume: noise cameras.

The cameras are activated when they record a sound louder than 85 decibels, which is about as loud as a lawn mower. And they are increasingly being used by the Department of Environmental Protection to ticket drivers, according to Rohit T. Aggarwala, the department’s commissioner.

The new technology functions “much like a speeding camera,” Mr. Aggarwala said. The cameras are always on, but they start recording only when loud sounds are detected. Violations cost offenders between $800 and $2,500, he said.

The city installed its first noise camera early last year as part of a pilot program, Mr. Aggarwala said, and it was tested in several locations in Manhattan and Queens.

Since then, the city has purchased nine additional cameras, at a cost of roughly $35,000 each. Seven of them were in use as of late last month, with the rest set to be installed by the end of the year.

And on Wednesday, the City Council passed a bill that established a citywide noise camera program. The new measure will require that at least five cameras be installed in each borough by Sept. 30, 2025.

Keith Powers, the primary sponsor of the bill, described the noise in his district, which encompasses much of the East Side of Manhattan, as a “constant aggravation.”

“We’ll always be living in a city and there will always be a number of different issues that we have to accept as part of life,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we should totally surrender ourselves to a noisy environment.”

Arline Bronzaft, an environmental psychologist and noise pollution expert who has studied noise in New York City for decades, said the deafening sounds that roar out of some vehicles can seriously harm mental and physical health.

Few people have done more to try to turn down the city’s volume than Ms. Bronzaft, 87. She has been advising mayors, subway administrators and other officials since the 1970s, when she completed a widely publicized study that determined that schoolchildren in classrooms next to train tracks in Inwood performed worse than those in quieter classrooms.

People who are regularly exposed to loud noises can experience higher levels of stress, have difficulty sleeping and are even at an increased risk of cardiovascular issues, Ms. Bronzaft said.

Sitting in her “noise room” — an office inside her Upper East Side apartment where she keeps decades’ worth of research — Ms. Bronzaft said noise cameras could be an effective way to reduce New Yorkers’ stress and help them sleep.

“Do you know why New Yorkers walk very quickly on the streets? To get away from the noise,” Ms. Bronzaft said. “So I’ll always advocate for potential products that potentially ameliorate noise.”

She added, “This is for the people who are losing sleep, the children that may not be able to do their homework.”

Charlie Mydlarz, a research associate professor at New York University who studies soundscapes and helped lead a yearslong noise pollution study that involved placing microphones across New York City, called noise “a slow killer.”

“Noise isn’t dropping people on the streets, but it’s slowly affecting people,” he said. “If you’re having to adjust to a high level of noise when you move to a loud part of the city, your brain is using energy to effectively ignore that high level of noise.”

But some worry the new technology poses a significant risk to New Yorkers’ privacy.

Jerome Greco, a lawyer with the Digital Forensics Unit at the Legal Aid Society, said there were too many questions about how well the cameras work, who has access to the data they collect and whether they can be activated by noise created from a block party, children shouting or a protest.

“Whenever you have new technology that is capable of doing these types of things, it’s ripe for abuse. There are legitimate concerns,” Mr. Greco said, adding that he was not “anti-technology” and might support the use of noise cameras if certain safeguards were in place. “But at least as this currently exists, it’s problematic.”

Mr. Greco also questioned how the city had determined where to install the cameras.

“We’ve seen over and over again that any sort of monitoring or surveillance is often placed in neighborhoods with high populations of people of color,” he said. “They seem to generally bear the brunt of any of these things.”

The city doesn’t share the cameras’ locations, Mr. Aggarwala said, to ensure that drivers of loud vehicles don’t avoid neighborhoods with cameras and to prevent critics from vandalizing them.

Mr. Greco expressed concern about the cameras’ ability to pinpoint the sources of noise, suggesting that some drivers could be wrongly targeted.

“It’s going to be their word versus this machine that seemingly has no other oversight,” he said.

As of late last month, the city had issued 218 violations to drivers of vehicles with modified mufflers and 147 violations to drivers who were excessively honking, both infractions of the city’s noise code, Mr. Aggarwala said. He noted that more than 90 percent of the violations had been upheld by an administrative hearing officer.

Despite some vocal critics, Mr. Aggarwala said he had spoken to many residents who supported the technology and that several council members had requested that the cameras be installed in their districts.

Gale Brewer, the councilwoman representing much of the Upper West Side, successfully petitioned for a camera to be installed in the neighborhood.

The area’s residents, Ms. Brewer said, are constantly complaining to her office about noise, mostly from traffic and construction. She hopes the cameras “will catch the person, they’ll get a ticket and then they won’t do it again.”

Ms. Bronzaft said she was eager to see whether the cameras affected the city’s volume.

“I’m excited to explore any technique that might lessen the noise,” she said. “But you have to make sure you pursue it in a scientific way.”

She added enthusiastically, “Show me the data.”

Claire Fahy contributed reporting.