“And to your left, shaking his fist, is a genuine, angry West Village resident!”
New Yorkers living in the city’s toniest neighborhoods want officials to pull the plug on the obnoxiously loud speaker systems used by tour buses.
The steamed residents yesterday squared off with tour-bus guides at a heated City Council hearing on a soon-to-be-introduced bill that would require all new buses to trade in their public-address speakers for individual headsets for tourists.
Tour-bus guide Matthew Baker argued that his livelihood “should not be disregarded in favor of a privileged few who can afford to live in our city’s most interesting neighborhoods.”
But Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who authored the bill, told The Post that her constituents in the West Village “hear the voice of the guide as if the person is sitting next to them in their living room, no matter if they’re on the 26th floor or the second floor.”
Residents who pay to live in the most historic sections of the city said they are fed up with the tourism industry wrecking their quality of life.
“They’re worse than that ice-cream truck jingle,” griped Little Italy resident Rob Marx.
Others said there was no reason why the 250 licensed tour buses in the city — 150 of which Brewer said have tops that are open in the summer — have to blare inane information about areas they’ve lived in for years.
“There’s no reason they should be so loud. Us locals don’t need to hear a tour of the area we live in,” fumed Olivio Terminello, 36, of Little Italy.
Heavily affected areas also include the East Village, Chinatown and SoHo, Brewer said.
“There is nothing as intrusive as this,” testified Cormack Flynn, a West Village resident. “At least half of what they say is not true. It’s folklore, the tour information.
“I’ll be sitting in my living room watching television with my wife, 25 feet from the front of my apartment, five stories up, and we have to give up time because there’s a tour bus stuck outside of our house.”
The bill, which will be introduced tomorrow, would apply to all buses bought after April 1, 2012.
It also says every bus would have to be compliant by 2022.
Tom Lewis, who manages Gray Line bus tours in New York, said installing the headphones would cost his company $3 million.
While admitting that the requirement is “economically manageable,” he still begged that it not take effect until April 2013 to provide time to look into potential health concerns with shared headsets and into union issues with the increased work required to implement and run the system.
“[We] do not think that government mandates and more red tape are necessary to improve the situation and can only hurt the city’s neighborhood tourism economy,” Lewis said.