How Noisy Is Your Neighborhood?

[chris08876]

Interactive Map: https://maps.bts.dot.gov/arcgis/apps...464cc0e9d5c9fb

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How Noisy Is Your Neighborhood? Now There's A Map For That

There's no denying it: Los Angeles isn't exactly gentle on the ears.

That's one lesson, at least, from a comprehensive noise map created by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. On the interactive U.S. map the agency released this week, which depicts data on noise produced primarily by airports and interstate highways, few spots glare with such deep and angry color as the City of Angels.

Blame the area's handful of major airports and its legendary snarls of traffic — ranked this year as the worst in the nation.

If any Angelenos would like to escape to quieter pastures, though, they've got options.

"More than 97 percent of the U.S. population has the potential to be exposed to noise from aviation and Interstate highways at levels below 50 decibels or roughly comparable to the noise level of a humming refrigerator," the BTS notes in its release.

The agency says it used data compiled by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Highway Administration to draw up its map, also borrowing the tools of both to determine average daily noise levels produced by transportation.

So if you should happen to find yourself stuck beside a particularly cacophonous construction site or concert venue, sadly your aural plight won't get any mention from BTS.

But cities like New York City and Chicago naturally offer plenty of visual proof of just how loud it can be to live in a big city. Those bright spots of purple on the pointillist displays below can pack an average of more than 80 decibels of transportation noise a day — or, as BTS puts it, about as much noise as a garbage disposal.

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http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-w...a-map-for-that

[mhays]

Noise is SOOO much more complicated than that.

I used to live a block from a viaduct where the echo effect created a constant roar. That was fine, preferable even.

But a car alarm or "wooh!" shrieks when I'm trying to sleep? Hell no.

I live in a dense, semi-noisy neighborhood, but chose the alley side of the building...very quiet 99% of the time at night. The exceptions are when someone is talking on their balcony which echoes like hell. Or some douche lets their dog bark outside.

[niwell]

Yeah, the constant urban noise is easily blocked out after a while. Even things like distant sirens and such fade into the background easily. My neighbourhood is pretty quiet but I occasionally hear yelling outside at night as there are a number of rooming houses nearby and some interesting characters. That's really the only thing that bothers me. My previous place was about 100m from a major streetcar intersection with streetcars running 24hrs. For the first few nights it was hard to sleep but after a while it became background noise - to the point where when I moved I had trouble sleeping again without it!

Similarly one of my friends grew up in Caracas in an apartment on the side of a hill, so the roar of the city was constant. When his family moved home to suburban Niagara Falls he apparently couldn't sleep for days because it was so quiet.

[montréaliste]

Originally Posted by niwell

Yeah, the constant urban noise is easily blocked out after a while. Even things like distant sirens and such fade into the background easily. My neighbourhood is pretty quiet but I occasionally hear yelling outside at night as there are a number of rooming houses nearby and some interesting characters. That's really the only thing that bothers me. My previous place was about 100m from a major streetcar intersection with streetcars running 24hrs. For the first few nights it was hard to sleep but after a while it became background noise - to the point where when I moved I had trouble sleeping again without it!

Similarly one of my friends grew up in Caracas in an apartment on the side of a hill, so the roar of the city was constant. When his family moved home to suburban Niagara Falls he apparently couldn't sleep for days because it was so quiet.

Funny! I suppose his suburban house was nowhere near the roar of Niagara Falls per se.

The question of noise in the city is an intersting and important one indeed. I used to live in a suburb of Montreal two very long blocks away from a highway and heavily used rail tracks that combined ViaRail, Suburban trains and high frequency Freight trains. Those two blocks were more like 4 city blocks long where I live now. In the summer, when it rained at night, the sound of cars and trucks was pretty loud .The airport was close by and a high school next door meant schoolbuses as well as city buses made the place fairly noisy in the middle of sprawly suburbia.

Fast forward to our move to the city in a neighborhood down the hill from downtown, a block away from an elevated freeway that I can see from my studio's window on the second floor of my old house. The noise is nowhere as intense as what it was. There is no bus on my street bar a couple of schoolbuses am and pm. The sound of mowers in the summer is non-existent. It is a lot more pleasant in this dense, quiet, leafy city street than our old place.

[photoLith]

I live on a busy Main Street in a dense urban neighborhood with buses that run right by my window about 10 min. That doesn't really bother me anymore and I have a fan on at night to drowned out the noise. Whats really annoying is the d bags who rev their douche giant trucks outside my window down the street. In the summer though motorcycle d bags get to be incredibly annoying. One asshole works early I guess and revs his engine all the way down the street at about 630 in the morning every single day during the warmer months and theres a bar a block away that motorcycle dicks hangout all summer long and rev their engines trying to show off. And the occasional white trash idiots arguing with each other late at night screaming up and down the street are annoying. But I still would much rather live in a dense urban annoying sound neighborhood than the suburbs any day of the week.

[Sam Hill]

I've found that living on a relatively high floor is the best when it comes to city noise. Once you’re up higher than the eighth floor or so, the city sounds completely different. You can hear more. You can hear every siren and every train horn off in the distance, etc., but it all sort of blends together into a steady, quiet hum of city noise. The more annoying sounds that might happen in close proximity to your building, such as a car honking or idiots screaming, aren’t nearly as annoying way up there as they would be if you were down on the first or second floor.

[Sam Hill]

Originally Posted by photoLith

I live on a busy Main Street in a dense urban neighborhood with buses that run right by my window about 10 min. That doesn't really bother me anymore and I have a fan on at night to drowned out the noise. Whats really annoying is the d bags who rev their douche giant trucks outside my window down the street. In the summer though motorcycle d bags get to be incredibly annoying. One asshole works early I guess and revs his engine all the way down the street at about 630 in the morning every single day during the warmer months and theres a bar a block away that motorcycle dicks hangout all summer long and rev their engines trying to show off. And the occasional white trash idiots arguing with each other late at night screaming up and down the street are annoying. But I still would much rather live in a dense urban annoying sound neighborhood than the suburbs any day of the week.

At the risk of offending any of my fellow skyscraper nerds who might also happen to be Harley-Davidson enthusiasts or whatever, I’m going to go ahead and say that if you own a ridiculously loud motorcycle, you’re an idiot. You’re not impressing anyone. Nobody thinks you’re cool. We all just think you’re an idiot. I can’t tell you how much it pisses me off when I see a pack of Hells Angels types roaring down the street, leaving a chorus of wailing car alarms in their wake. That may very well be my biggest pet peeve.

[Boris2k7]

My condo is a few blocks from the CBD, next to an entertainment district (with an arena for the City's hockey team/concerts, a casino, and a convention centre), between two traffic arteries, near a transit maintenance facility, and also a near a rail line. It's fairly noisy, but easily filtered out -- as others have mentioned. It helps that I'm twenty storeys up.

One thing about the background noise is that it takes on a different pitch and intensity depending on what time of day it is. On the whole, it's cyclical. But it is also punctuated by much sharper, more distinct noises like sirens, or the shouts of idiot sports fans.

Some noises stand out at certain times of day -- the loud ka-thunk of the freight trains coming to a halt is barely audible during the day, but at night it really stands out. I also can't hear the whine of diesel buses during the afternoon, but you can clearly tell when they are starting their morning runs.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Sam Hill

At the risk of offending any of my fellow skyscraper nerds who might also happen to be Harley-Davidson enthusiasts or whatever, I’m going to go ahead and say that if you own a ridiculously loud motorcycle, you’re an idiot. You’re not impressing anyone. Nobody thinks you’re cool. We all just think you’re an idiot. I can’t tell you how much it pisses me off when I see a pack of Hells Angels types roaring down the street, leaving a chorus of wailing car alarms in their wake. That may very well be my biggest pet peeve.

Yeah, those guys are pathetic.

[montréaliste]

Originally Posted by mhays

Yeah, those guys are pathetic.

What they need is a big undergound garage where they rev up bigtime and smoke themselves out to a netherworld of non existence.

[Pedestrian]

Well, I find the yappy coyotes annoying at night and also the train whistle from 5 miles or so across the valley.


https://www.google.com/search?q=Gree...BnbS3XLl4QQHM:

[austlar1]

Originally Posted by mhays

Yeah, those guys are pathetic.

That is the whole point, to piss people off. That, and the fact that they get a hard on from pretending to be (or maybe actually being) naughty sociopaths.

[10023]

Originally Posted by Sam Hill

At the risk of offending any of my fellow skyscraper nerds who might also happen to be Harley-Davidson enthusiasts or whatever, I’m going to go ahead and say that if you own a ridiculously loud motorcycle, you’re an idiot. You’re not impressing anyone. Nobody thinks you’re cool. We all just think you’re an idiot. I can’t tell you how much it pisses me off when I see a pack of Hells Angels types roaring down the street, leaving a chorus of wailing car alarms in their wake. That may very well be my biggest pet peeve.

I wanted to set up a tripwire on my street in NYC to decapitate those assholes when they went past at 3am.

Motorcycles over about 150cc are not appropriate for city use, and if you've removed the muffler to make it even louder then you should just kill yourself.

[Eightball]

Pretty damn noisey in downtown Los Angeles

Thankfully when they renovated my building they put in high quality windows

[Easy]

These look like maps of airport flight paths.

[Gresto]

Quiet, except for the construction noise of the McMansions constantly going up.

[BrandonJXN]

Chicago is loud but I've gotten used to it. I live in Portage Park. You can hear the El from all over the city, firetrucks/ambulances/cops blare every 15 minutes, honking excessively, garbage trucks crashing dumpsters into each other at 4 in the morning, and the steady stream of airplanes landing at OHare. Every once in a while, a motor cycle gang will rumble by. I'm used to it however. But as loud as all of that is, nothing is louder than being under the Kennedy whenever the Blue Line roars by. That is loud. Even then I'm used to it. I find it comforting. I'd be more alarmed if Chicago was totally silent. Silence is more nerve racking than noise.

[pico44]

Originally Posted by BrandonJXN

Chicago is loud but I've gotten used to it. I live in Portage Park. You can hear the El from all over the city, firetrucks/ambulances/cops blare every 15 minutes, honking excessively, garbage trucks crashing dumpsters into each other at 4 in the morning, and the steady stream of airplanes landing at OHare. Every once in a while, a motor cycle gang will rumble by. I'm used to it however. But as loud as all of that is, nothing is louder than being under the Kennedy whenever the Blue Line roars by. That is loud. Even then I'm used to it. I find it comforting. I'd be more alarmed if Chicago was totally silent. Silence is more nerve racking than noise.

I used to say the same thing living in New York. Then I had two kids and moved to the burbs, and I haven't been jolted awake by a car alarm, garbage truck or honking car in over four years. It's wonderful. Instead my ears are bombarded right now by the sounds of countless birds singing and our brook bubbling down the hill. In fact, I always brag to my city friends that we lucked into the quietest block in a ten mile radius around New York. And I'd be willing to go toe-to-toe with any block out to twenty miles. This map is a nice confirmation of my theory

Aside: When I lived on the Upper West Side, there was an entrance onto Central Park Drive at the end of our block. So every morning there would be a steady stream of cars down our little side street. On trash days the garbage truck would take their sweet, passive aggressive time about lumbering down 90th, blocking traffic entirely. Commuters stuck behind would occasionally lay on their horn, sometimes for five or ten seconds at a time. This would be at 7 am! So I started throwing things from my fridge at the cars below. Usually a hunk of cheese or a biscuit. If the guy was a real a-hole, an egg. Then all our neighbors started doing the same thing! It was awesome. Just Irish confetti all down the block! Once in a while, if we were lucky, a douchebag would jump out of his car and stare up at us menacingly; and we would all laugh and yell at him. Good times

[chris08876]

I'm over in Branchburg, a suburb, and the biggest noise I hear are the sounds of birds yelling at each other early in the morning. During the morning rushhour, you can hear the sound of 287 or Route 22 in the distance. Almost like white noise. Its in the background but very mild.

Crows are culprits of noise. Also sometimes during mating season, deer can be heard. Lots of deer in my area. They seem to congregate in my yard sometimes, and come up with domestic policy for the area such as which flowers to eat or whose yard to crap on. At least thats what I think they are up too.

Dogs as well. Sometimes you'll hear them barking.

But other then that, it's kinda quite. Nature is the biggest source of noise pollution I guess.

My neighbor as well. He has a modified Shelby Mustang, and its quite loud so any time he turns it on, you know he's packing 600+ hp.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by chris08876

deer can be heard. Lots of deer in my area. They seem to congregate in my yard sometimes, and come up with domestic policy for the area such as which flowers to eat or whose yard to crap on. At least thats what I think they are up too.

What they are up to is giving everybody Lyme Disease--but deer ticks don't make much noise.