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Europe Begins Noise Mapping Effort
Makarand writes "The European continent has begun its fight against noise pollution by initiating a
program
to map noise levels for cities in the European Union with more than 250,000 people.
As placing microphones on every building in London or Paris to measure noise
was not practical, data on the amount of traffic carried by roads and the noise levels was fed into computers to generate a model of noise levels across the city. The model's accuracy was verified by taking readings with microphones at 100 points in the city and was found to be accurate on average to within 1 decibel.
The noise maps will allow planning to insulate the public from noise by directing traffic away from residential areas and making funds available to sound-proof thin walled homes."
That article reads like a piece of prose... very nice, but not much good for a news article :)
Anyway... I just play my music so loud I can't hear all the urban noise all around me... (London)... But then I guess that makes me part of the problem
I don't think America worried about this as much, as there was always more land, more space, more suburban sprawl. In European areas where land has turned more of a scarcity, then we see this interesting phenonom as a solution. Perhaps the same principals will be applied to more congested American cities too. It seems a good, bottom-up approach: re-routing traffic light signals and road development based upon environmental feedback.
The Custom Mary
BIKES? I guess you do not mean motorbikes. Because of the increase in congestion in and around Paris, there are more and more people that use motorbikes/scooters. The result is a big increase in noise levels, no reduction in polution (bikes produce more polution than most cars, surprisingly) and a large increase in fatal accidents.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Please explain this to me. Someone purchases a house with walls that aren't very sound proof. They presumably knew this at the time of purchase, it would be ridiculous to think otherwise. Someone else spends the time to investigate their choices, and eventually spends more money on a house with more sound proof walls. Why should the person who spent extra to buy a house with soundproof walls now have to pay additional taxes to soundproof someone else's home - someone else who didn't care enough about it to shop for that feature in the first place?
It's obvious if you live in Europe, where a lot of houses and buildings are old, and do not provide adequate sound-proofing.
If you add to this situation the fact that a lot of streets in large European cities are small and not made for cars (meaning medieval streets, not US-Grid-Style streets/boulevard), you have a recipe for a lot of noise and pollution, which many European cities are/were not designed to take into account.
Also, if you are lucky enough to find a cheap place to live in one of those cities (London and Paris -- for instance -- are among the most expensive places on Earth), noise control is going to be the least of your worries -- rent is a killer in those cities. And forget about space, since having more than one bedroom is going to deplete your bank account for the next 10 years or so.
Finally, I suspect most european governments are going to finance this simply by giving tax-breaks to people who will overhaul the sound-proofing of their flats and houses, and not tax other home owners.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
of how complex these issues are, is the national airport in Brussels-Belgium : being such a densely populated country, there's no practical way to have airplanes land & take off without flying over housing areas. And with both traffic and houses increasing, the problem has now reached proportions where people are starting lawsuits against the govt for noise terrorism. Some have dozens of planes flying over at low altitude per night. That's a plane every 10 minutes. You try to sleep with that. Even tripple-isolated glass & roofs can't stop the sound of a cargo airplane. Especially old, russian planes (who have now been ruled illegal for flight)
Allthough, personally i would find the noise the least of my worries : my mother in law lives near another airport (Oostende) After those huge, bulky cargo planes took off, there's a very intense kerosene odor that hangs in the streets for 15-30 minutes, depending on the weather. Yikes !
I don't understand how peeps in Singapore survive this (well.. i gues they don't...)
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Why microphones? Why not a decibel meter? Surely that's the proper tool. Ubiquitous microphones sounds like the seed of yet another Orwellian nightmare.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The Holy Bible inspired the crusades, the inquisition and the murder of thousands through sectarian violance. Kings and leaders throughout known history have claimed God as inpiration as an excuse to murder and pillage. Does that make the Bible any less valid as a guide to how to live your life and a general learning tool?
"Marx inspires them to go out and kill tens of millions of people. "...is a fact. Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, and even Milosevic had Marx as their main inspiration.
Oh sure, they all claimed to be Marxists. I can claim to be a Libertarian and go out and claim state benefit, or claim to be a pacifist and then start a war. Big deal. The very fact that not one single person you actually list never enacted a true Marxist society proves quite easily that they were not Marxist.
Ive not read the whole of the posts here, but Im willing to bet there are allot of people crying "oh, this is pork, governments wasting money -- ha ha you Europeans pay tones of taxes and see it wasted ha ha suckers. bureaucracy run amuck with naval gazing. ha ha." kinds of attitude.
Really, how better to dedicate the resources of ones culture than the investigation of the cause/effect and remedy for general, shared problems? Why the hell not? I can think of no better things to investigate.
The masses are convinced -- almost without pause -- that spending money on single-serving yogurt-like snacks(ever *made* your own yogurt -- VERY VERY GOOD & EASY), RetiredBoxerBrand electric grills (whats wrong with your stove?), ZXY(TM) Brand $200 shoes, and blah blah blah is a good reward in exchange for my personal effort (the $ youve collected in exchange for work).. I say hogwash.
If Im going to sacrifice 40hrs of ever week, I damn well want something worth while in exchange for my Cached-Work($). Being the sucker in some capitalist's get-rich scheme, at the expense of the planet (pollution/waste/garbage) is not all that attractive -- but insead of paying for research like this (in taxes) people are usually DrivenByMindControl to buying SomeDamnedGarbage.
Where am i going with this? What is more useful? What is the greatest benefit of the product of our collective resources (the above mentioned consumer-garbage) **OR** some peace from the endless noise in a mechanized-industrial city....
I am willing to forgo buying some of that seemingly-benign-consumer-garbage in order to help pay researchers to think about something useful. Are you? Im betting most sane, normal people would agree. Instead of working to make Widgets (as I do), I wish there was a greater market for doing something WorthWhile. The Automobile that I contribute to manufacturing is not a goal I consider worthy of my time. I have no problem working, its the *goal* or product of my effort that is worthless. But, we live in a world with F'ed up priorities (we spend to much of our Cached-Work($) buying Useless Garbage, making the production of Useless Garbage a more common goal that most would like)
These kinds of 'decisions' and 'trade-offs' are taking place all the time (every thing you do has an impact on the world). Stop and think occasionally: "what benefit, at what cost is my decision having to bear on myself and my community? What responsibility do I accept or abandon that are the consequences of this decision? How can I make the world just a little better at Zero or No 'cost' to myself or my community?"
So, how far off topic is this?
I guarantee I'm not causing any noise in NYC. I don't live there. I don't drive there. I don't commute there. Therefore, I don't want to pay for the problems there.
If you read my post, you'll see tolls mentioned. Proper tolls will solve the commuter problem. Taking money from national defense will not. If the free market requires people to travel, they'll find the money to pay the toll. If they don't have the money to pay the toll, they won't use those roads, and there won't be as much need for insulation. I am not the problem, and I don't want to pay for it. I choose my charities. I don't want anyone else choosing for me.
-- No sig for you!
A better solution would be to have the homeowners association pay for the sound barriers.
When I first moved into my current residence, things were relatively calm. Not quiet, but calm - I could easily handle the road(tire) noise from the cars that passed by, because it had an ebb and flow similar to the noise that ocean waves might make. Over the last few years, the city has issued permit after permit, filling in every possible empty space, adding apartment complex after apartment complex, more businesses, etc. Then some brilliant city planner decided that they'd re-design the park across the street so that instead of acting as a good medium for sound absorption (a sloped surface covered with rock), they'd fill it in and turn it into a grassy area. A natural and forseeable consequence has been a tremendous increase in traffic noise that I hear. And the boomcars driven by panty-waist little boys starving for attention - another headache. Lately, I've been hearing heavy diesel trucks, whose drivers just DELIGHT in downshifting as they come up to a stoplight at a nearby intersection.
All of this, I'd argue, is a result of poor city planning and ineffective law enforcement. I'm not responsible for creating the problem, so why should I have to pay to fix it?
Article said:
Paris already is taking action, covering more sections of the noisy ring road, directing traffic away from residential zones, building a tramway, and replacing City Hall vehicles with quieter models. By year's end, one-quarter of Paris' 416 garbage trucks will run on natural gas, 50 percent quieter than current diesel models, City Hall says.
Instead of rerouting ALL traffic away from noisy areas, how about giving quieter vehicles priviledged access, while rerouting only the old/noisy vehicles away? That would give the private sector more incentive to make the switch. Sort of like the diamond roads in the US.
There are skeptics. Peter Wakeham, director of Britain's Noise Abatement Society, said funds for mapping could be spent soundproofing thin-walled homes.
"Are they going to shut the nightclubs? No. Are they going to put in better traffic systems? No," he said. "Common sense tells you where the noisy places are."
I used to live right next to a bar last year, and it was surprisingly quiet. It might be because the bars can't serve alcohol after 1:00 a.m., or maybe the loudness of bars are over-rated. Proper walls are surprisingly adequate in keeping the noise level down.
Tompsett said that 10 to 15 computers, standard PCs with Pentium III or IV chips, are at work on London's map. Eight off-the-shelf PCs with expanded memories took nearly a year to do Paris' daytime maps.
Hmm.. a beowulf cluster, perhaps? But it took a year? wow.
1 decibel isn't a constant. Isn't it logarithmic? The difference between 1 decibel at the 10-11 range is different than 1 decibel at the 50-51 range.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.