Noise trespasses into your quality of life. It changes your health every time a lawn mower runs at 90 decibels (85 decibels damages hearing). You may enjoy a motorboat ride, but you probably shouldn't. From 50 feet away, motorboats, at 80 eardrum-pounding decibels, are louder than a semi.

We have 20 million leaf blowers whose only mission is to move your leaves next door, where your neighbor blows them back over again. What we're left with is audible litter and leaves that never really go anywhere. (By the way, gas leaf blowers are prohibited in Pacific Grove, so cut it out.)

But three cheers (quiet cheers, please) for the anti-alarm group called Silent Majority, which is working to eliminate one of the loudest offenders: car alarms. The insurance industry has admitted that car alarms do nothing to reduce car theft, even calling them "alarmingly useless."

Chicago, Hawaii and New York City are all considering bans on car alarms. As far as I'm concerned, they also could eliminate the adrenaline-producing "beep" heard when someone locks their car. Are we really so lazy we can't look to see the car is locked? Do we have to have an alarm tell us?

Cheers, too, to Vancouver, B.C., whose City Council banned idling car engines. The Idling By-Law prohibits running a parked car's engine longer than three minutes. No unattended cars can be left idling, which saves hundreds of tons of carbon emissions along with fuel, money and needless aggravation.

While Vancouver is quieting the cars, some cities are eliminating cars altogether, making for quieter, walkable streets. Rome has closed more than 100 streets to cars. Copenhagen and Toronto were leaders in going car-free through the "pedestrianization" of their streets. There are more than 30 pedestrian, car-free outside malls in the United States, which have become thriving tourist centers. People flock to Santa Monica's carless downtown, and if they miss it, they pay good money to visit Disneyland's and Universal Studios' carless artificial downtown Main Streets. We long for it. We'll buy an admission ticket to see it.

So let's see which will be the first enlightened city in Monterey County to eliminate cars from a street and not just during a farmers market. Every day. How about Pacific Grove, the first to sign the Environmental Accords? Picture Lighthouse Avenue closed to traffic like a perpetual, thriving, smaller Good Old Days. If 20,000 people can come to Good Old Days and find parking even though Lighthouse is closed, a few thousand can do it every day.

Now if someone will just do something to eliminate wind chimes, I'd be a happy girl.

Joy Colangelo of Pacific Grove is an occupational therapist. Her column runs in Commentary on the first and third Sundays of each month. She can be reached at bellpg@AOL.com and can be heard the first Friday of each month on Deborah Lindsey's daily radio show, "Tomorrow Matters," from 2 to 3 p.m. on KXRA 540 AM.

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