I'm talking about neighbors living in rural/suburban areas.

EDIT: We have a lawn care guy. He does our half acre in under 30 minutes. Our neighbors who do it themselves - same half acre size - typically take 90-120 minutes. They'll just sit on a riding mower and let it idle for minutes, while looking up stuff on their phones. Or let it idle and go inside for a drink, while leaving it running. They enjoy riding around with a loud engine underneath, like a really slow motorcycle. This is not speculation, it's from talking to them.

The business people have an incentive to get in and out quickly - they can do more lawns that way.

The people who like loud engine noise have no such incentive. They have an incentive to have a lazy afternoon of lawn mowing.

I'd love to work outside with my hands all day but not with those horribly loud power tools. They seem like fighting against nature somehow.

The bigger issue imo is that we incentivize the wrong things. Money and time instead of quality and a job well done. It's faster to blow loudly than to rake silently. A silent landscaping company powered by reel mowers and rakes would clear less properties per man hour, but maybe there is in fact a market there for that premium, nearly silent service.

Garbage pickup is once a week, and the truck is close enough for me to hear it for maybe 15 minutes. Double that for recycling pickup.

I live a few miles from the city center, in just about the densest area where people still have lawns. There are maybe 5 houses close enough to me that I could hear a leaf blower from if I’m inside the house (loud enough to notice). Even if each one runs a lawnmower and leaf blower for half an hour each week, that’s 2.5 hours per week tops (only 2 of them actually use leaf blowers, and most only cut the grass 1x every 2 weeks). Also in most of the country mowing only happens a little more than half the year.

Compare that with road noise, and sirens, which I hear far more often.

I can't find any 2 stroke mowers at Home Depot, Lowe's, OSH, or Sears. (The vast majority use Briggs and Stratton engines. B&S makes a few 2 stroke engines, but AFAIK, they're only used in snow blowers.) Where are you finding "generally"?

The trucks driven by lawn service folks generally get around 10-20 mpg. They don't spend hours on most job sites - most jobs are much less than an hour of mowing, with an hour or so doing other stuff. Then it's back in the truck for 15-30 minutes. The mowers less than half a gallon during that time and the trucks use about a gallon between jobs.

I mean I do agree that gas lawn mowers are noisy obnoxious smokey things that blow dust around. But a leaf blower's whole purpose in life is to blow dirt around - and at full blast they're way louder than the loudest lawn mower.

Plus the lawn mower takes like 10-30 minutes to mow a yard in most yards out here. Probably 15 if the person operating it is doing it quickly.

Leaf blower though? I can see those jerks using those things for a good 45 minutes or so! Ugh.

Now I look for the surrounding area to be slightly weedy or unkempt, but not completely out of control, as a sign that no one is going nuts with lawn care. Which I then take as a sign that no one is going to drive me nuts with their equipment.

The most ridiculous and obnoxious thing so far is the apartment building across the street from my current place. The landscaping company had a man on a riding blower who was also using a backpack blower at the same time. What a cacophony of engine and blower noise to no useful purpose.

My neighbor has a family member come and do their lawn (I offered my guys to them for free, and they turned it down). So every Wednesday or Thursday, for nearly 4 hours, there are various 2-stroke engines going on. It is a HUGE noise, and my home office faces their house so for most of the day I'm having to ask people to repeat themselves because I cannot hear them over the sound of the neighbor's lawn equipment.

There's little we can do when someone gets pleasure out of running a loud motor for hours at a time. He started a leaf blower, then left it running next to our window while he went inside for about 10 minutes (bathroom visit probably?). Just... insanity.

That and the crushing car dependency.

My neighborhood is a mix of income levels; those who do their own lawn use smaller equipment, and they use one at a time. The wealthy ones have a crew of 6-8 people with a loud mower, multiple weed whackers/trimmers and multiple leaf blowers all at the same time. On the noise level, I measured it to be as loud as a jet airplane taking off—except it lasts a whole hour.