Once government assigns a top priority to noise abatement it must establish a noise abatement function with the responsibility and the authority to oversee all government planning and actions that modify the noise environment. At the present time the various existing agencies are jockeying for control of this field.
Fearful of the powers of a central agency, some would prefer to keep noise abatement as a fragmented operation of government. Is it logical to give the responsibility for eliminating hovercraft noise to the FAA if the craft operate 18 inches above the ground, and to the state police if they operate closer to the ground, and to the marine agencies if they operate above water? The Federal Council for Science and Technology recommends there be no central mechanism.
But today there is no instrument of government on any level capable of performing an effective noise abatement function. The answer may be a Department of Ecology. But this remains to be developed after the new ecology is clearly defined, and the definition includes man in his artificial environments, as well as man in relation to grass, trees, insects, and mountains.
For the immediate future, the Public Health Service offers one practical answer. It has a pilot program to learn from: the National Air Pollution Control Administration, an agency of the Consumer Protection and Environmental Health administration of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
A pro-people noise abatement program will be so radical, it will be necessary to train a new corps of noise control experts. We are going to have to teach our engineers the principles of design for quiet. It was a shock—and the world of noise abatement is one shock after another—to discover that engineers are not being taught the elements of noise control.
We are going to have to teach noise abatement in the technical high schools. At the present time noise control is limited to graduate students, either in physics or in engineering. For basic urban monitoring and enforcement, a program on the high school level may be adequate. We turn out automobile mechanics and radio and TV repairmen in our high schools; there is no reason why we cannot train noise control technicians at that level. The Zurich Police Office of Noise Control is staffed by men who have received one year of noise-abatement instruction at the hochschulle. To meet the needs of everyday noise abatement we will need thousands of technicians, far more than the handful of men exposed to noise training in graduate courses or in the defense and space programs.
Courses of instruction will include traditional decibel techniques, plus lectures on the purpose of man and government, the social sources of noise, and the ecological consequences; lectures by independent medical and other researchers on the extra-auditory as well as the auditory effects of noise—and more.
Regulatory officials, planners, department heads, highway design and transportation officials should graduate from this program with a belief that the city should not remain what Lewis Mumford calls a "tyrannapolis." An esprit de corps should be developed in this student body, a sense of dedication to a cause almost as exciting as space exploration, and much more difficult to pursue.
Once dispersed to their duties, the men working in the government sector should be encouraged in their loyalty to the novel objective of putting people first. Regulations should be established to remove any potential for conflict-of-interest between top policymaking members of regulatory bodies and the industries they regulate.
A corps of noise abatement specialists with a zeal for their work will reduce the need for detailed legislation. They will find it possible to quiet the noisemaker in the absence of a specific law, and to enforce noise abatement law without fireworks. In their attitude of partnership for maximum tranquility, these men must think of themselves as educators in a new field, not as police.
To hear what's going on, all levels of government should institute some form of noise monitoring.
If the chief sources of excessive noise, such as aircraft, cannot be designed to operate quietly for another fifteen years or so, we must restrict the number of intrusions. Psychoacousticians tell us that annoyance from aircraft noise is the result of a combination of the amount of noise and the number of exposures. The number of flights, especially in the critical early morning and evening hours, must be curtailed. The new airbuses make this economically feasible—if the aviation industry is not permitted to continue to schedule the same number of flights per day as it does with the smaller aircraft.
If the automotive industry forces us to live with existing truck levels, then we have no choice but to reduce motor vehicle speeds on highways adjacent to residential and other noise-sensitive areas.
If the construction industry drags its feet, the operating hours for noisy equipment should be reduced each year until the ban is complete. Let industry adjust to "acceptability" criteria for a change, and we will discover that it prefers to design quieter products.