It’s really understated how much noise is purely from engines idling, and this largely brings up the average noise in a city.

There’s plenty of techniques to reduce noise coming from highways, then that leaves the noise in city streets where EVs are vastly, vastly superior from a noise perspective. It just brings down the noise floor overall.

City speeds are way below 50kmh (even below 30kmh in most cities!) and ICE cars are a lot louder when accelerating. So I'd love to see more EVs in our city too. Especially in winter days when the motors are not (yet) warm enough to clean the exhaust gas...

> City speeds are way below 50kmh (even below 30kmh in most cities!)

You mean during rush hour, right? Else please tell me where, because it's certainly not in most cities.

In SF bay area, there are always gas cars trying to show off their horsepower especially during rush hours, no matter how slow the traffic is. That noise is more annoying than tires.

I can't imagine the cars can go very fast in SZ during rush hour, Beijing is the same way.

I'm seeing variable speed signs displaying 40 km/h during non rush hour daytime on "normal" streets, and some 60 on main thoroughfares.

Honestly if they honked a bit less that might make a large difference too...