> more traffic - more noise - more pollution

These are often true, but not inherently so. I've lived in remote rural, suburban, and dense city environments. My dense city had disadvantages, but it was quiet and had little traffic or pollution. In my experience the suburban environment is the worst for all three once you get off the residential streets, there's loud, polluting traffic (3/3).

In two of the places I lived, I couldn't keep the window open due to the constant tire noise. It wasn't an issue in the densest place I lived, which was a low-car-traffic place and pleasant to be outside in. Now, I live right next to a freight rail yard, but I don't find the train noise grating like the highway noise.

If anything, my experience is that NIMBY's also strongly oppose things that would reduce traffic, noise and pollution. Because a low traffic zone, reduced speed limits, or bicycle lanes, would infringe on their ability to drive their car everywhere without any disturbance.

Don't forget the gas powered leaf blowers. A whole symphony of them.

Do urban centers deal with NIMBY vs YIMBY? It was always my impression that this was more of a suburban thing… multi-family or mixed use developments going into areas that are all single-family homes.

These are people who left the urban area to get away from the density of the city, but didn’t want to move far enough away from conveniences for it to actually be quiet.

These are area that typical have poor public transit (at least the places I’ve lived), so adding more density does add more traffic and noise. Offering alternatives to address that is a decades long project that requires a lot of political will and significant inconveniences for residents during construction.

I lived in a city that implemented a lot of road diets, while building more apartments and condos, and it was a mess. If you happened to live downtown and were staying in a walkable area downtown, it was fine. But getting to and from downtown, to go grocery shopping, was painful. It was possible to live outside that downtown ring for easier access to the surrounding area, but then going downtown for dinner had significant friction, as they didn’t have good solutions. It was either a very slow and infrequent bus, or use a car.

> Now, I live right next to a freight rail yard, but I don't find the train noise grating like the highway noise.

I used to live a block away from a Metra stop in Chicagoland. I now live near where two interstates cross and there are a lot of street racers. While I do hate the bikers, when those trains would stack up and 3 or 4 of them would spend 5 minutes blowing their whistles back and forth constantly while I was trying to sleep, it would drive me insane. I can hear the trains from where I am now, but I’m a bit further away and it’s not like those rush hour Metra trains.

I have the feeling there are a lot of different situations with trains. I had an AirBnb in London and 3 days in I realize the window (covered with curtains) had been wide open the whole time. When I looked outside there was a ton of train tracks, but I didn’t even notice any noise.