I live maybe 3/4 mile off of what USED to be a quiet backroad.
Couple years ago the highway department finished building a bypass that, well bypassed the original curvy narrow 2-lane that connected the road I live on to the nearby town. The road near me is still narrow, goes through 2 school zones, but it's just not as curvy as it once was
5:18 this morning the first log truck passed by the house. There will be likely 50-80 of them today. It happens daily Mon-Fri unless the weather is bad enough that they can't run logs to the mill. Each and every single one of these trucks is running heavy or somehow illegal. I've followed a ton of them on the way to work. Rock guards missing. No straps on the load. Too long. Too heavy (shakes the house). Nary a one of them has a muffler of ANY sorts. Sure they're all turbocharged but a 12 liter inline 6 whether it's got a "rotary muffler" or not is just going to be loud. Not to mention that they're absolutely annihilating the roads. They run this stretch of road because they're all illegal, and the major highway that they "used" to run is loaded with DOT cops doing their job. You'd think that the weigh boys could set up out here by the house & they could write up a boat load of tickets. Income generators for sure, especially considering that the school zone is 25 mph and most of these guys are running 45+. With nobody to tell 'em it's wrong, they ain't gonna stop.
Sure there's a few guys with diesel pickup trucks that think they're cool (and nary a single one of them sound remotely "good"), then there's the guy across the road that's got a '67 Camaro with a procharged 482" making over 1000hp, but that don't bother me. Every once in a while the guy who lives up the road (a cop of all things) will have a big party on a week night, all nighter usually. There is some weird stuff going on down there. Well I know he works for the police dept and works nights. They keep me and my other neighbor up all night, well payback's are hell. You see, I got racecar. Yes I have approval from the other neighbor.
The guys with the dodge diesels think they have an 18 wheeler but they don't. All they have is a diesel engine that sounds like crap. Every one of them. The old 6BT's were "ok" sounding, but I'd rather than have a quiet muffler on them--that is if you could hear the exhaust over the clatter of the engine. Powerstrokes? All sound like crap. Duramax? Horrible. I have a Powerstroke (old 7.3) and I hate the way it sounds with louder-than-stock exhaust. My old truck was a 6.0 (2003) and it's turbo was really loud with the straight pipe. In the truck you couldn't hear it but outside everyone could within about a mile.
Harleys? Noise. Crotch rockets? All noise. What gets me about the crotch rocket guys is that they like to put loud muffler on them (or remove it altogether) and in most cases, they make less power than they did WITH the muffler. For a while I had access to dyno and tuning stuff at work for doing this kind of thing and every single time, exhaust change reduced power, increased noise. The ONLY bike that sounds "decent" is the crossplane R1, and even then only at lower RPM (up to about 10,000). It sounds like a muffled sprint car.
I work on a major highway. Daily the noise level from the highway is a constant 78 dB. That's JUST the road noise. Inside the building in the shop with all the fans running it'll be 92-93 dB for 9 hours straight in the summer. Earplugs are a must. I have permanent hearing loss due to the constant noise from the fans, etc. My ears ring continually and the left is no good. The noise from daily working conditions are typically louder/more dangerous than anything near the house but I get paid to work, I don't get paid to listen to these moronic illegal truck drivers waking me up at just after 5am every day.