Deutsche Bahn introduces "MetaWindow" (opens in new tab)

Some progress in Europe yes but the harms are still far from getting enough attention and policy responses. One problem is that there's so little organized effort against noise pollution, there's need for a movement with grass root organizations that puts sustained pressure on this issue.

Contrast with John von Neumann, who "could not work without some noise or at least the possibility of noise. Some of his best work was done in crowded railroad stations and airports, trains, planes, ships, hotel lobbies, lively cocktail parties or even among a bunch of shrieking very minor minors whooping it up."

Persistent noise pollution increases stress levels..And I felt the impact of this myself when construction work started near my office. It’s very hard to concentrate.

Unfortunately, where I live, more and more people have dogs. It's now a risky proposition to live in an apartment in a closed city block, because it's almost guaranteed that someone will leave a dog barking outside for hours.

It's all about whip cracking! Who knew that was such a thing. Like the mindless honking horn of the past. Thanks for sharing :)

For intercity trains it doesn't matter what the propulsion method is though, since every train will make a lot of noise at speed. It's improved with aerodynamics and better wheel / tracks, but ultimately noise will be an issue. Consider also cars where at speed the noise is not due to the engine, but to wheel / road noise.

Rolling stock lives for many decades and replacing it early is cost prohibitive. So I don’t think changing something about the trains is the best option for reducing noise.

What evidence other than your anecdotal evidence that a lightweight passenger train creates less noises then a heavy load freight? I am sure there are some differences in regards to design and age but wouldn't you imagine the majority of the difference is in weight? Passenger trains weigh nothing.

At some point someone made me realise that almost anything that can be said about graffiti can also be said about outdoor advertising.

> It always baffles me that people are in such a defeated state of mind that graffiti is just simply accepted and seemingly nothing is done about it.

As usual, the answer is found by examining assumptions: 1) It's somehow bad, and 2) People strongly want it removed. (And by accepting those two assumptions as true, and it's also true that the street art remains, that argument infers despair.)

I and many people don't think it's Bad (avoiding a specific definition, an endless discussion). I don't mean it's always Good or never Bad, but generally IMHO it ranges from easily ignored to decent to some really inspiring stuff.

And I find it generally inspiring that some kids have the spirit, creativity, initiative, and determination to do it; to express themselves and not be suppressed by society. Adults have so much agency; it's great to see kids seize some, and in a harmless way (they aren't injuring people, risking anything, etc.). I see the suppression of graffiti as telling kids to be 'seen and not heard'. People embrace billionaires who break rules and then kill and impovrish on a mass scale; all these kids are doing is painting something.

I'd almost advocate that kids have free reign to paint public property (that would seem to get out of control, and any announced limit may be an invitation to break it). It's their city too, and adults should have to live with what the kids have to say. (Still - how could that work? Any undecorated or unfinished surface?)

I understand you may not agree; we need to find a balance.

I mean, one way to look at it is just that graffiti is just... fine, really. It's not generally a huge deal in the scheme of things.

Do you think this "MetaWindow" is much more attractive? Here's a similar looking transparent sound barrier in a new building area that is already starting to be covered in graffiti: https://youtu.be/e7-Fd1HOw_g?si=OTNn_NyV_W7iJStz&t=265

At least some light will still get through in the gaps between graffiti, but I don't think they will end up looking much different than non-transparent barriers.

It makes it more depressing to see them though. Who likes to be reminded that people will just deface public property for fun?

No, it doesn't. Before it was a plain metal wall, now it's ugly metal wall with idiotic tags on it.

There is exactly nothing about defacing public infrastructure which elicits the tiniest spark of "admiration" or "interest" in me.

If you want to live out your "artistic ambitions" do it somewhere away from public property.

I can also start a subculture about competing for the best type of bank robberies, doesn't make bank robberies a nice thing to do. But yeah fascinating

That's fair, but even interesting graffiti still won't let any sunshine come through. Also, I would rather look out the window [0] than appreciate artwork when riding on a train.

[0] https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/rheinland-pfalz/trier/17134459...

My city is filled with horrible graffitis. Some types of ugly signatures, even on historical buildings. It takes only a few weeks after walls are cleaned up to see new graffitis reappearing. It's really sad.

I'm from a country where they once called up the fucking Interpol when someone vandalized a subway car and ran away. There are many things I complain about my country, but this isn't one of them.

You wouldn't admire it if you were in a coffee shop and someone decided to unload their artistic ejaculation on your MacBook. Public infrastructure belongs to the public, no single person is the owner, and you don't get to deface it just because you think it's pretty that way.

Cleanly maintained public infrastructure sends a message: that this is a place where people take these things seriously.

In our city graffiti is allowed on a couple select bridge pillars and retaining walls. Those often have excellent artworks that anyone can appreciate.

Not that illegal graffiti can't produce great art too, and the illegality is a part of what fuels the culture. But I've come to the conclusion that if a place is likely to be "vandalized" by graffiti anyways you are better off just allowing it and see what people do without the time pressure of avoiding arrest.

If you dive into: [wine, jazz, modern art, craft beer, tennis, …] (pick one), you’d also appreciate it more.

Thing is, if I decide not to do that, the impact on my life is relatively minor. What gives graffiti artists the right to impose their personal predilection unto others?

In other words, given your reasoning, what’s stopping me from playing John Coltrane at 110dBA the whole day and night?

This entire sub-thread has me worried about society. People that thinks this way about the common good is why we can't have nice things. This is why it'll always be "50% vs 50%" and why we can't all get along and need to be separated.

Some people actually have to live in your decadent cyberpunk wet dream, you know?

If you only call graffiti the so-called "street art" then yeah but when most are bullshit tags from teenagers in the same cliche style with 0 creativity then it's trash.

And the problem is that 99% of the graffiti in the world is trash tags in stations/trains which has the direct impact of giving a rough feel to any well-meaning location.

So to me, that kind of graffiti is the result of a "me important" mentality which totally disregards the rest of the community who just loses in all fronts (including aesthetics and monetary).

Sure but it's been like that since forever and doesn't change the original point that you may be ever so innovative but it's gonna be painted over

Everybody can see the difference between graffiti art and graffiti vandalism. No need to look into the story behind it. Most people appreciate beautiful graffiti and hate the ugly tags and other untalented crap.

Shiny pile of shit is still pile of shit, I’m glad people are starting to remove the graffiti. Nobody except hippies likes it.

The “competition” associated with the MS13 “artwork” that covers up stop signs and street names in my neighborhood sure seems to involve a lot of guns and human rights violations.

Would you be happy to wake up to your car covered in graffiti? It's "art" after all! If not, why not?

The vast majority has no aesthetic value to 99% of people and certainly not to the owner of the property.

The same can be said about cartel killings.

Ugly defacement of public property.

I mean, if they appreciate the effort going into the keeping the infrastructure working, they can have some (un)written rules like not spraying identification numbers, street signs, transparent surfaces (like windows), I think many people will appreciate what they do and the story behind more.

I’m all for street art, but not fond of not being able to navigate because some group decided to let me they were here by making a road sign unintelligible.

Highly recommend the movies by the 1UP crew to get a feel for why this is actually great art.

Reminder: You're replying to a comment about graffiti potentially covering something that's supposed to be transparent.

God I hope they graffiti the robot dogs as well because that would be so funny.

But who do they deploy when the robot dogs get out of hand?

Yeah I'm deeply disappointed that these so called "hackers" are so united on such a tired, pro-authoritarian view on the use of public space.

In many places in Europe there is a de-facto truce between graffiti artist and the local governments: You can paint/tag some areas.

Typically noise barriers are such, while trains themselves or stations are not.

Harder persecution both by authorities and self-policing in the subcult community after some prominents were persecuted and agreed with to help normalize the situation has led to the current status quo, which for example in Hungary has normalized the situation pretty much, public transport and stations are generally not vandalized, and some larger well exposed areas were designated as local "legal walls".

I guess the panopticon (cameras becoming cheap and ubiquitous) also helped

These guys know the city in and out. Only in cases where you already expect them, you could be able to catch them. Also, police always has to prove you did it, and not some other member of the group.

https://youtu.be/Y9Lm0dkkVAw?si=NDHBYtciFPDhp78I

Almost everywhere, but it's fairly low priority and impossible to prosecute without Orwellian levels of surveillance.

I'm pretty certain it's an offense in most developed countries.

I don’t know, I doubt I would want a URL this long on my wall.

Weirdly it says "up to 10dB" attenuation.. which isn't actually that much at all. 10dB would be a halving/doubling. I'm not sure how the apparent loudness / change in waveform amplitude display is so great, considering that actual hard stat...

Honestly, that demo alone would be enough to get funding at any demo day, really cool stuff.

Fascinating, and now I learned another new thing! Thank you for sharing.

There is a balance to be struck though. For example where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are millions of people whose commutes are objectively faster and cheaper on the BART train, but the vast majority of commuters still choose to drive a personal vehicle over a congested and expensive toll bridge. The primary reason for this is that the train is just so damn unpleasant for a multitude of reasons (including noise) that most people find the extra wasted hour worth it to them to have a more pleasant commute. Whenever the agency that runs the train proposes spending more money on things like human excrement abatement, noise abatement, etc. people complain and protest about mismanagement and money wasting, so nothing ever gets better and the infrastructure continues to be underutilized.

I think you're missing the point.

Many public transport projects are dependant on the community around allowing them to be built, mitigating the impact of said projects allows more public transport to be built.

E.g. a tram doesn't go very fast and is also pretty quiet. A train usually runs a lot faster, and causes more noise pollution.

If you can mitigate the noise, then you'll probably be able to build the railway instead of the tram. Allowing more capacity, higher speeds, and a better public transport solution.

The (highly recommended) Belgian television series "In de gloria" [1] had a teleshopping sketch in which one could order VHS tapes of their favorite tracks. The target audience was pensioners who had traveled the same boring track for years.

The irony is that some years later a television channel started broadcasting railway videos all day long.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_de_gloria

The idea is to install only a few of these, possibly only in designated railway carriages. It would make for a great conversation starter, which might be an improvement over people staring at their own screens.

A large fraction of trains and buses in Europe are already equipped with large full-color monitors. They are primarily used to show trip progress, potential transfers, and basic informative messages. Ads are rare, and are usually static images advertising the transport company's own products.

DB is still a 100% state-owned enterprise; it’s “private” in name only.

Sort of like Singapore Airlines, which is listed but majority-owned by one of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds.

Thanks that one is better! At least it says: "m Bild: Herkömmliche Lärmschutzwand und MetaWindow im Vergleich (Visualisierung)"

They should just use the new picture and not make the previous way of doing things so central. If one just looks at the picture it could appear as if the wall changes translucency dynamically.

Sounds like it, yes. I remember negative refractive index materials, now that I think about it. The press release should not invent its own term (meta technology) just to sound fancy. Just say meta material.

Someone turned on the DB signal[1] so here I am.

> sometimes trains are late sometimes, but the trains themselves are great and travel in them is a joy.

"Sometimes"? Let me tell you about my friends in the German area of NRW. The one that commutes far away regularly gets stranded on the way because the trains arrive so late that there's no connection home till the next day and because, of the two lines that take her home, one is closed. The second one commutes within the city and has decided to buy a car because the SBahn was closed for over a year with a repair that took longer than planned. The other two don't even consider trains in their daily life. My GF at the time had a year-long line closure, we moved to a place with a year-long train closure and I'm living now in an area where my regular train won't run until November (assuming no delay).

Yes, DB trains are pretty nice on the inside. Quiet, too. But what good is a nice train that doesn't take me to where I need to go, or at all? If anything, I think those that don't rely on the trains daily fail to realize how bad the situation is. Ten minutes delay on the one ICE trip on holidays? Sure, whatever, it's fine. Ten minutes delay on a five minutes connection to work? Enjoy wasting half an hour of your life every other day, like I did during my studies.

Switzerland has cut DB off [2] and Scottish fans received warnings [3] about how unreliable German trains are. It is bad.

[1] The DB signal is like the bat signal for comments downplaying DBs issues, but you often don't see it because there's a "Signalstörung" and it shows up an hour later. They usually apologize for the inconvenience.

[2] https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/deutsch...

[3] https://www.indonewyork.com/m/science/european-football-cham...

> I think what Germans don't understand is how good they have it compared to many places in the world.

They should care about how other transportation systems are around the world as a coping mechanism?

I mostly travel around DACH region + Nordics/Spain/Netherlands and sometimes the contrast in terms of reliability, maintenance, and integration makes me feel that Germany is 10+ years back in time.

But they had it better only a few years ago. DB has really crumbled.

Under normal circumstances I would agree with you. But is DB and they really need to go all hands on deck and fix their reliability problem.

Hell I used to bike 20km to work to avoid it

> And that means noise protection anywhere where the tracks are adjacent to residential areas, but NIMBYs will launch intensive protests if they get presented with a massive wall of steel in their backyard - understandably so, these things are an eyesore.

Though to some extent people got themselves into that situation of their own fault by constantly screaming about noise and nothing else – politicians listened and tightened up the rules for noise protection, with the result that legally noise protection is now weighted 100 % and visual aesthetics 0 %. Whereas to my knowledge the Swiss still take a somewhat more balanced approach, and don't completely disregard the visual impact of noise protection barriers.

Complaining about train noise is a national hobby, so the legal rules for noise protection have been significantly tightened up in the last decades and now multi-metre high noise barriers (up to four, five or even six metres) are a legal requirement. The end result being that people still complain about fear of more noise when infrastructure upgrades are proposed, but new they complain about visual blight, too. Even where local property owners would be okay with somewhat more elevated noise levels (or having sound-insulating windows installed) in return for lower noise barriers, the infrastructure operator is legally required to build the full-height wall even against the wishes of the adjacent property owners/local municipalities.

In the absence of national sensibilities on noise returning to e.g. Swiss levels (where AFAIK balancing noise protection vs. its visual impacts actually is an official planning goal), less ugly noise protection barriers are a worthwhile development. (They've also managed to make freight train noticeably quieter by requiring composite-materials brake shoes, which don't roughen up the wheel treads so much, but beyond that there aren't many more easy gains in noise reduction to be had…)

Yes that’s why track redundancies are important. And not just for construction. Local and Intercity connections would benefit as well.

What are you talking about? DB Infrago is a subsidiary of DB and is as such governed by the board. The fact that they are separate entities has purely corporate legal reasons.

The prospects of building something new with this tech are very distant. Just to get an approval for construction in Germany it can take years and then there will be traditional delays along the way. We won’t see it in any meaningful quantities before 2030-2040 - whether this project will survive until then is an open question. The acute service problem on the other side could be addressed by simpler means like investment in IT and better internal processes. My last trip was cancelled one hour in advance, despite that they knew it couldn’t happen days before. I had to visit their travel center, because the app couldn’t apply my seat reservation to alternative route, and that experience was awful. It is very hard to understand why some tech that may never see the light due to bureaucratic hurdles deserves investment at the time where service doesn’t show any signs of improvement.

The article posits it could make approvals to build new rail lines near noise sensitive areas easier.

This is a tech website though. It’s not unusual to see Facebook’s parent company mentioned in a hn submission’s title.