After giving this post some thought, I'd like to throw out a something that happened to me several years ago.
My wife and I were driving up a hill in the Vega (remember those???). Along the side of the hill was road, also a hill, that was hidden by trees. This road almost Y'd onto the road that we were driving on. To clarify, he was coming downhill, blind, into a Y, where he would have been headed up hill. What this guy was thinking is beyond me. I heard him coming down the hill, changing gears as he went. Needless to say, when I got to the intersection, I knew he wasn't going to stop, so I did. He hit the dip in the intersection, the bike lowsided and spun around about four or five times with him still on it. Damage to him and the bike was minimal under the circumstances. Needless to say, if I hadn't heard him and stopped, he would not have walked away. Do loud pipes save lives? In this case, yes.