The sensor cocktail has been used to extract data from the environment and place that data within an SQLite database named measurements.db via Node-Red. The data is then extracted in order to generate the quoted statistics in this video.

Daytime as per the law is defined between 8am and 10pm such that the following SQL query exacts the noise datapoints throughout the day:

SELECT noise AS x, STRFTIME('%H:%M:%fZ', DATE) AS y FROM DATA WHERE (y BETWEEN '08:00:00' AND '22:00:00')

Unfortunately, for the night, the query has to wrap around the clock because SQLite only compares numerical values:

SELECT noise AS x, STRFTIME('%H:%M:%fZ', DATE) AS y FROM DATA WHERE ((y BETWEEN '22:00:00' AND '23:59:59') OR (y BETWEEN '00:00:00' AND '08:00:00'))

Using awk in order to compute the SD, the following command is ran on the command line that will query the database inline:

echo "SELECT noise FROM data LIMIT 452774" | sqlite3 measurements.db  | awk '{ x += $0; y += $0 ^ 2 } END { print int(sqrt( y/NR - (x/NR) ^ 2)) }'

where:

• 452774 is a number that marks the current time when the measurement was made; this value is carried throughout all commands in order to ensure that no new datapoints are accounted for in the final conclusions.

SD can also be computed for the day and the night in order to determine when the statistical aberrations occur the most.

Here is the command to compute the daytime SD:

echo "SELECT noise AS x, STRFTIME('%H:%M:%fZ', date) AS y FROM data WHERE (y BETWEEN '08:00:00' AND '22:00:00') LIMIT 452774" | sqlite3 measurements.db | awk -F'|' '{ print $1 }' | awk '{ x += $0; y += $0 ^ 2 } END { print int(sqrt( y/NR - (x/NR) ^ 2)) }'

and here is the command for the night time SD:

echo "SELECT noise AS x, sTRFTIME('%H:%M:%fZ', date) AS y FROM data WHERE ((y BETWEEN '22:00:00' AND '23:59:59') OR (y BETWEEN '00:00:00' AND '08:00:00')) LIMIT 452774" | sqlite3 measurements.db | awk -F'|' '{ print $1 }' | awk '{ x += $0; y += $0 ^ 2 } END { print int(sqrt( y/NR - (x/NR) ^ 2)) }'

After several complaints, the National Environmental Guard and the Police Road Brigade respond citing some measures that have been taken in order to address the horrible noise level. The Police Road Brigade responds, citing, "applied 82 contravention sanctions (11 motorcycles), out of which 76 were due to technical issues and 6 for deviations from the laws governing road transport".

It seemed that not much had been accomplished, the noise did not really seem like it would have much to do with the police claims; the motorcycles aside, it seemed untrue and dubious "how defective" a vehicle must be in order to generate this amount of noise and not only that but the noise would just be an unintended result. Furthermore, lots of the noise sources stem from cars racing, also with an intermittent mixture between police sirens and cars accelerating, such that it would seem implausible that the complaint would have seemed as "novel news" to the police that definitely listens to the same pollution if they are in the area.

To solve the mystery, a decibel-meter was used, based on the sensor cocktail project and the noise was recorded for about a month. As it turned out, as per the law, Art. 16, Ord. Nr. 119/2014, it was discovered that 87% of all the noise generated (that is, all points collected) found themselves above the legally admissible limit of 55dB(A) during the day and 45dB(A) during the night. The main contribution to the 87% is due to the night-time noise level that always flies above the 45dB(A) mark but it was also found that the overall standard deviation (SD) turned out to be 4, with SD being 3 during the day and, as expected, SD being 5 during the night. The high SD indicates a large scatter pattern where peak noises are very characteristic of the measurements and would indicate that, in spite of the overall hum that often times lies at 56dB(A), the peaks are the ones that give the distribution a highly spread pattern. Experimentally, using video (not provided due to privacy concerns) the peaks were traced indeed to vehicles, sometimes even the police itself using the sirens during the day on empty roads, other times cars that used the city roads for races and sometimes even vehicles that were seemingly not altered deliberately to generate noise (perhaps hand-me-down cars with engines that generate noise due to age).

In 2024, another complaint was filed with the National Environmental Guard that passed the complaint to the Romanian Traffic Police. A clean version of the video posted above was passed along as part of the complaint as justification for the noise. Officially, the response from the police has been fairly similar, the same sort of "numeric salad" being cited as justification of activity on behalf of the police, ie: "1450 vehicles and motorcycles were verified, 1329 sanctions have been applied out which which 1167 turned out to be defective cars and 141 for other […]" Contrasted to the response from 2023, this response is more elaborate, however also unbelievably useless given that a lot of the response consists in transcribing pages from the already existing law but without any direct reference to the matter at hand.

What is even more worrying is the overall vagueness of the response, along with statements that would be ironic to be true, as well as statements that are trivial to the point of being funny, especially given the complaint that has been filed. For example, citing, the response says "[watching roads] is an activity that is always in the attention of the police" as well as "in case [there are any traffic code violations] the police have at their disposal the legal measures that are conferred to them through the law", both of which are trivial, perhaps true, but also do not answer the complaint. In fact, in case the police were "always aware", then there would be no need to complain. In this response, the police claim that "the law […] is not clear about sanctioning the noise level created by vehicles […]", which might be true to some level iff. the statement is strictly about "sanctioning" and not the actual limits in effect. All limits in effect are cited within Art. 16, Ord. Nr. 119/2014 of the law and are extremely detailed in terms of time of day, the type of establishment, the type of activity, and the corresponding allowed noise level. Only as per our own knowledge, is there a lack of specification on the actual "amount to be fined" in case these norms issued by the Ministry of Health are not respected, such that the response from the police is only true, and to our knowledge, if they claim they do not know how much they have to fine. However, the specification on the noise level is extremely specific, with bars, club, construction work, etc, all being specified along with the admitted sound level.

Then, we're back to "bozo land" to the heights of Idiocracy, with statements such as (top of page 2) "In order to determine exceeding the noise level produced by vehicles specific measurements must be performed with gear designed for this purpose.", which is a truism of phenomenal proportions and ironic given that the video presentation handed to them consisted in measurements, such that the person filing the complaint would be well aware how to measure noise level and would also additionally have the right gear to do it. Further on, another statement is made, citing "The procedures for measuring the noise level, [for cars] being either mobile or stationary, corresponding to each vehicle type are complex and laborious", context in which these cannot be applied in the case of traffic control because the conditions of measurements are influenced by a series of perturbing factors." which consists in a non-sentence that first constitutes in malinformation given that a decibelmeter does not scale with the car type and would give the same results whether you'd be measuring the oinking of a pig or the honk of a car, a decibelmeter and even a commercial one is specifically designed with a microphone that can be pointed at a car such that it could even be used for "regular traffic inspection" and also it must be said that as per Art. 16, Ord. Nr. 119/2014 it is the obligation of the noise generator, be it a vehicle, to be designed in such a way that it conforms to the law (if they do not, an "alternate" scale is not used, as the police response would imply, but rather the very same scale and the vehicle should be prohibited from participating in traffic). Finally, as per the cited sentence, there is the issue of claims such as "measurements" being "complex and laborious", that one would not really know what to respond with - work can be tough.

As for the gear, and the concerns that the measurements are "difficult", the sensor cocktail created, if combined with a camera, would be able to (even) automatically snap photos of the noise generator as well as measure the noise level being emitted. In many ways, one could create a device similar to a speeding camera, only that it would be a noise camera.

As a conclusion to the investigation, it seems that the following points could be made because they have been clearly established:

• Anti-noise laws exist and are well in-effect, as per Art. 16, Ord. Nr. 119/2014, with clear details on the amount of noise and how and/or where it is produced and even relative to the building type and so on, such that it is not the case that no laws exist to sanction individuals that are producing too much noise
• Art. 16, Ord. Nr. 119/2014 gives a specification, including citing ISO norms of audio isolation that have to be implemented by either the designer of the object / vehicle, or if not, then the vehicle should not be allowed to participate in traffic (this is more or less the same as CO2 emissions have to be applied); in other words, while it is true that international markets have brought in vehicles such as bicycles with 1-stroke engines, iff. the vehicle cannot conform to the environmental specifications, then they should not be allowed on the road (or stationary, to cite the police),
• The argument that, "oh well, New York has a base hum of 90dBA" are null and void when one takes into account that the complaint was filed against noises that were peak generator that felt three standard deviations away from the median and that can additionally be precisely pin-pointed to the object or vehicle that is generating the noise.
• The place where the experiment has been carried out has easy access to motorways that are vastly less populated than a major artery of a city, as well as benefiting from much better roads than city roads that are trodden every day by vehicles and high tonnage vehicles. The fact that the noisy vehicles generate the noise inside the city, only makes it clear that the intent is malicious and deliberately seeks to annoy people, given that there are safer and better alternatives available. In other words, it is not the case where people just don't have an option where to drive and have fun with these vehicles (as a counter-example perhaps, the excessive restriction on drones imposed by the Romanian government that bans their usage within the city entirely, including parks and similar, such that people would have to massively go out of their way to just be able to take off as per the laws in effect).
• Although not discussed, the noise level tends to also scale with speed, such that the response from the police is even insincere, even in terms that noise levels do not even have to be checked and the police can directly just measure the speed of the accelerating vehicles that race on the roads because they exceed the speed limit for sure given how loud they are.
• The reports frequently insist on cars that have had the exhaust modified such that the car generates more noise, yet that is not the case and during the investigation it was determined that right about all of the generators consisted in crap motorcycles, such as bicycles with 1stroke engines, or very old scooters that were about as noisy as a lawn-mower. Similarly, there is some concern that the cars generating these noises are, in fact, second-hand cars and are old in terms of engine such that the noise they generate is well above newer cars. The "accelerating vehicles" are also motorcycles that speed on the main artery such that those are not really modified yet so designed to be speedy. It is indeed tough to determine, but it seems like very few of these noise generators would truly boil down to "cars with exhaust modifications" and perhaps even "tuned cars".