Cities Skylines 2: How To Make Your City Quieter & Reduce Noise Pollution

As your city expands in Cities Skylines 2, and you place down more ocmplex structures and pathing, you'll likely be met with some disgruntled citizens posting about their irks on Chirper. Mainly, that the city is just too noisy. This complaint is a funny one — of course it's noisy, it's a city! 

But maintaining citizen happiness is a key element in levelling up your ciuty and progressing through Milestones. With that in mind, it's worth taking a look at what you can do to reduce the amount of citizens complaining about noise pollution. Below, we'll go over how to make your city quieter, and reduce noise pollution.

How To Reduce Noise Pollution In Cities Skylines 2

Build Industrial Buildings Away From Residential Areas

When you're building a major structure, such as a Coal Plant or a Train Depot, you'll notice that the building will have a rating for noise pollution. This is indicated by a headphones icon. The more headphones icons a building has, the more noise pollution it will emit. 

The problem is that a lot of these buildings are necessary to provide certain services. So, to reduce the amount of citizens being troubled by noise pollution, it's best to build any noisy building well away from any residential areas. You can also try to keep any major highway or high-traffic roads away from residential areas, too. 

But, even if you plan your city taking into account these noisy buildings, you still might end up with messages from citizens saying that things are still too loud. 

Set Up Districts And Enact Policies

There are certain policies you can enact in Districts you've created that will help make your city quieter:

• Speed Bumps — Unlocked at Milestone 5. Reduces the speed of vehicles driving within the district. This lowers the chance of accidents and brings noise pollution down significantly. 
• Heavy Traffic Ban — Unlocked at Milestone 6. Trucks and other heavy vehicles are forbidden from entering the district. This reduces noise and air pollution and can help traffic congestion. Highways remain unaffected. 
• Combustion Engine Ban — Unlocked at Milestone 10. Fuel burning vehicles are forbidden from entering unless they belong to district residents or businesses. This reduces noise and air pollution within the district. 

How To Fix A Noisy City In Cities Skylines 2

While you might be getting what seems like a lot of messages on Chirper, all complaining about noise pollution, in truth the problem might not actually be that bad. You might notice that a lot of these messages don't have many "likes," which suggest that it's only a few families or citizens complaining about noise. A handful of citizens won't drastically affect the overall happiness in your city, so you can largely ignore their cries for quieter spaces. 

The notification might be annoying, but your city is likely operating well. When more and more citizens start "liking" these messages, or you suddenly get a huge wave of notifications come through, then you might want to take another look at your building and infrastructure placement. 

For the most part, though, you'll likely receive complaints of noise despite having little to no noise pollution. In which case, there's very little you can do until the developers raise the complaint threshold.

Curious to know a little bit more about Cities Skylines 2? Check out our review.