What Noise Pollution Is Doing to Us
currentaffairs.org
currentaffairs.org
And emergency vehicle sirens which also seem to run 24/7, since there's always some kind of emergency somewhere that apparently everyone needs to know about.
It's disappointing that there appears to be little to no effort to reduce noise pollution. Federal regulations are unfunded and unenforced, while any state and local regulations seem to be ineffective.
I would like to see complaints about noise pollution taken seriously, but usually people who complain about noise are either ignored or belittled. It isn't considered an issue of any significance whatsoever, and is at best given the kind of consideration that a tobacco company might have for lung health.
What do you think is its source?
> aircraft noise, which seems to be constant over US cities
I cannot find the piece of information a.t.m., but I read that in the USA the percent of territory spared from aircraft noise is a tiny fraction - including wilderness and National Parks. Which is bewildering, for a landmass which is largely effectively uninhabited, and graphically a lit-east dark-west shape.
It is part of the problem: when you need real natural silence, and you check the most promising places on a map, it is not low density of infrastructure that can grant it: you can very typically go to the middle of nowhere and be overwhelmed by noise from above.
(...And from that one lone inhabitant, that one head in the one-inhabitant-per-square-kilometer, that, while apparently not having been forced to live in the desert, seems to hate the silence and fear he would suddenly die if his own noise ceased.)
> emergency vehicle sirens
Friends living in the USA report that sirens are much louder than in Europe - as they have to stand out of the already loud environment.
Really good question. I think it can be a combination of vehicle/road/highway noise, industrial noise, power plant/turbine noise, aircraft noise, and who knows what else. It seems hard to localize by ear, and the actual source could be miles away.
In some cities I notice buzzing electrical transformer noise which isn't quite low frequency rumble but it is still annoying.
There are probably other bizarre and mysterious sources of noise - I recall a story of residents of Sunnyvale (?) being disturbed by Apple's underground vehicle testing site which apparently operated at night.
Some companies and research labs do seem to run loud equipment and engines at night, I imagine because it would be too loud for employees who work there during the day. ;-)