The Scream's out of Ice Cream

The Stafford Town Council (NJ) passed an ordinance on March 3 that forbids vendors from attracting clientele through the use of loud devices. They include sound devices, mechanical bells, mechanical music, mechanical noises, speakers, amplifiers, or any other similar type of sound devices. The law also bans vendors from shouting, crying out, or blowing a horn. The only permitted proclaiming indicator is "hand bells or bells operated by human hands."

Township officials described their ordinance as a prudent response to the repeated complaints of residents' feelings of being barraged by blaring intonations from vendor vehicles.

Stafford's law is but the latest of many similar prohibitions across the U.S.--from Upper St. Clair, PA to Costa Mesa, CA. As long as ordinances' limiting noise is applied without regard to content, the courts have held, it does not infringe on constitutional rights. According to their sympathizers, the laws have worked--at least to the extent that complaints in areas of the legislation's adoption has diminished.

Stafford's new law follows one that has limited daytime noise to 65 decibels. Officials adopted the new ordinance because vendor trucks move about, making the monitoring of their decibel levels somewhat abstract. However, officials in Boulder, CO, where the noise limit from ice-cream truck noise is 55 decibels, said they regularly measured truck announcing sounds at between 70 and 90 decibels before their blare ban.