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Promises, Promises
Without commitment, noise abatement is a possibility, not a probability. At the time this book was being written, few scientists, few manufacturers, and few lawmakers believed that noise abatement warranted a place on mankind’s shopping list. Whether or not the straws in the wind discussed in this chapter are to be precursors of action will depend upon how effectively the informed can convince the insensitive and the indifferent that there is a noise problem.
Will noise abatement ride in on the coattails of the new movement for environmental quality? This will depend upon the long-run success of that movement, and how seriously its leaders take noise as a factor in the environment.
There is a chance that noise abatement will benefit from the new attempt to humanize science and technology, to inculcate new attitudes toward human beings which would require that they be spared the stress and cruelty of noxious noise exposure.
Bruited around in some scientific circles is the novel concept that the ultimate purpose of life might be man himself. At the 75th Anniversary celebration of that citadel of science, the California Institute of Technology, scientists told fellow scientists to base their standards on moral, cultural, and spiritual values. “Somehow people must be made to expand their sense of loyalty and responsibility to include a larger share of the human race,” said one speaker. The scientists were urged to start feeling for the human beings who would be living in the environments they are changing.
The physicist and the engineer, at their technical and professional society meetings, in the pages of their technical and professional society meetings, in the pages of their professional and trade magazines, are being made to realize they have ignored the human being as a receiver of noise. “If engineers were asked to describe a human being they probably would depict a creature without ears…Engineers should refuse to specify materials and equipment for residences, office buildings, hospitals and schools that will not allow human beings to function in peace and quiet,” said an article in the March 1969 issue of Consulting Engineer. It would have impressed me more were I not its author. Nevertheless, it is significant that the concerned citizen was invited by this magazine to express his views.
Engineer published Congressman Kupferman’s challenge to the excuse that noise is a necessary price of industrial and economic progress. That idea, he said, “is as antiquated as is the belief contaminated water and a polluted atmosphere must also accompany civilization’s advances.”
An editorial in Product Engineering (July 29, 1968) reminded the conscientious engineer that “In the products he designs in his professional career, he can fight as hard for quiet in lawn mowers and all the rest as he fights for efficiency, durability, and safety.”
One even finds thinkers in the think tanks telling their associates that their future role should be serving the total community without concern for the manufacturer or for profit.
This belated interest in human needs is reaching the colleges and universities. There seems to be a growing awareness that engineers need an education and not merely engineering training. As president of Rose Polytechnic Institute, Dr. John A. Logan called for a new kind of engineering education that would develop specialists concerned about the use of science and technology for the well-being of man. He believes that engineers must be taught how to use the humanities to make the world a more pleasant place in which to live. To this far-seeing educator, comfort and aesthetics are just as important factors in environmental health as disease control.
As the number of farmers decreases, the agricultural colleges are seeking legitimate new directions. They are concerned with developing nutrition and home economics programs that can be applied to the urban low-income groups. They are concerned with air pollution. There is no reason why extension divisions of agricultural colleges could not move on noise control. Rutgers University’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, in sponsoring noise pollution symposia, has already begun to move in this direction.
Signs of a people-and-environment interest are beginning to appear in the practice of medicine and in other professions. In 1969, McGraw-Hill’s Medical World News began a series on man’s threatened environment with a story on noise reporting that physicians “are increasingly alarmed” at the continuous exposure of human beings to today’s everyday noises.
The American Public Health Association is slowly responding to pressure to recognize that noise is a health issue. It is encouraging that not only did the American Public Health Association invite me to present a paper critical of its neglect, but it subsequently published “Noise and Urban Man” in its Journal. In a recent revision of its principles for housing design, proper noise insulation within dwellings was described as essential to health. It was also recommended that homes containing children and the aged should be protected from the noises of busy highways.
Some members of the legal profession are recognizing the need to protect man in the reasonable enjoyment of his property, and that to meet this need the excesses of technology must be curbed. On August 3, 1968, the Saturday Review devoted a section to the question: Can the law relate to the physical and life sciences in a manner that will protect not only the human body but human dignity? Its contributors answered in the affirmative, and saw the lawyer of the future, given the proper social orientation, as one who could help oversee the technical experts who now dominate the decisionmaking process.
It is encouraging to hear the outspoken contention of European practicing and teaching lawyers that the role of law is to protect man from the machine, and not the reverse. Zurich seems to be a center for this humanist thinking, and men like Dr. Schenker-Sprungli, Professor M. Keller, and Professor K. Oftinger take the position that the law must set limits to technology: that the purpose of law is to enforce moral values. “The right to live undisturbed is a fundamental right of the individual rooted in the law,” says Schenker-Sprungli. These men raise the question of the legality of invading the privacy of the home with disturbing sonic booms.
American conservationists are developing a legal attack on environmental pollution. The Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference fought to keep Con Edison from constructing a facility on Storm King Mountain that would have caused thermal pollution of the Hudson River. The Environmental Defense Fund fights in the courts to stop the indiscriminate use of DDT. The Conservation Foundation is developing a modus operandi for a legal defense of the environment. CQC is encouraging law students and young practicing lawyers to explore legal attacks on noisemaking. In time society will see there is not too much difference between poisoning fish and animal life with DDT and poisoning man with dB(A).
One of the four points of the “conservation bill of rights” includes reduction of excessive noise. New York State voters were given the opportunity to vote on this amendment to their constitution on November 3, 1969, and they approved it. A similar amendment has been proposed for the Federal Constitution. Once enacted, such amendments serve as a prod to make legislators enact implementing statutes.
If the conservationists win, cities, too, may become quieter. Any machine that must be muffled in the natural environment will eventually keep its muffler on in the urban environment.
There is evidence American architects are beginning to recognize the public has ears. Architect Samuel Paul dedicated his book Apartments, Their Design and Development to “People.” Published in 1967, this book contained a chapter on sound control written by his son David J. Paul, who foresees the day when sound control treatment will be standard practice in all apartment construction.
The New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects has initiated an annual environmental awards program to encourage design to make the city more livable. In January 1969 it awarded CQC a citation “For their acute awareness in advocating noise abatement.”
One of Expo 67’s major exhibits was Habitat, a new concept in dwellings that featured acoustic as well as visual privacy.
Foreign architects seem to be more active in promoting protection from noise than American architects. Canada’s Royal Architectural Institute has called upon architects to design enclosed spaces not only to protect workers from hearing loss, but to save the general population from noise-induced tension and fatigue. Nothing in the United States has matched the memorandum submitted in 1960 to the Wilson Committee by the Royal Institute of British Architects. This group pointed out that they cannot control the environment in which their designed buildings are to be located, and that government has a patent responsibility for environmental control.
The memorandum also took to task the aviation ministry’s favorable report on heliports in the London area. Unlike their American counterparts who are still unaware of what center-city aviation means, these architects made it clear that helicopters in Central London would mean “that the whole of Central London…will be subjected to noise levels equivalent to those on the pavements of Oxford Street; in the neighborhood of the helicopter station they will, of course, be very much higher…We are greatly perturbed at the loss of a sense of social values it betokens.” The Institute recommended rapid surface or underground transportation to the airports, and protection of residential areas from heavy traffic.
It was also recommended that the building construction industries set up a development program for quieter methods of operation. The key to the problem of industrial noise, the Institute pointed out, is in the hands of machinery designers.
Other recommendations included compulsory noise rating for machinery, the conversion into law of recommended sound insulation standards in buildings, and the development of a method whereby the people who create noise, not their victims, should be made responsible for spending money to control it.
This type of memorandum not only clarifies the issues for government, but gives the public a valuable base for its noise abatement efforts.
There is already the beginning of a crack in the wall separating the “expert” and the public, the beginning of a dialogue wherein both can exchange their views. In 1967 it was unusual for a promoter of noise abatement, thought of as “the other side,” to find himself offered a platform at the 74th semi-annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Yet a surprising number of the acousticians in the audience responded favorably to my thesis that the noise expert was neglecting his everyday human environment. One of them, speaking of his participation in the meeting, said: “It helps me to be a better acoustician in the civic sense.”
The Acoustical Society subsequently invited Dr. Rosen, CQC’s Board Chairman, to address its 77th semi-annual meeting. Papers on urban noise are proliferating.
One thing I learned in speaking to regional groups of noise experts: the rank and file has more of a people-orientation than the policymakers. There is a deep-seated desire to hear the public’s point of view, and an eagerness to learn more about how to participate in the campaign for noise abatement.
Acousticians are starting to listen to criticism of their esoteric, incomprehensible decibel world. As president of the Acoustical Society, Ira Hirsch conceded: “Our scientific jargon is not easily communicated to those who must quiet our noise sources, who must build the buildings in which people live or work, who must write the codes or municipal laws to protect the citizen, or who must enforce such codes…We must be willing to share our knowledge while translating it into ordinary English and algebra…”
Note the novel objective written into the preliminary report of one standards writing group: “The ultimate goal is to achieve a maximum amount of human privacy from intrusion by noise and vibration acoustically induced.” The people-oriented chairman of this group had appointed a sociologist and an informed member of the lay public to work with the representatives of industry and the acousticians.
In a letter to parsons that appeared in Gegen den Lärm, the magazine of the Swiss Noise Abatement League, the president and director of the League raised religious reasons for fighting noise:
For the Christian, silence is a prerequisite of the spiritual disposition, for in silence he is able to perceive the voice of God. Already in the Old Testament was this connection evident. Often in the New Testament one reads of how Jesus went out into the wilderness…If He, the Son of God, felt a need for silence, He, who…never fell under the influence of His surroundings, how much more do we need that stillness in order to come before God in silence! Uncounted numbers of men can no longer find this inner quiet amid the daily ever-present noise, and they thereby lack the natural basis for the deeper delving or believing to take place…
The Swiss are not the only ones seeking commitment from clergymen. In the United States, the first president of Citizens for a Quieter City was Jerome Nathanson, a Leader of the Society for Ethical Culture; Rabbi Edward E. Klein and Rev. Frederick M. Morris, D.D., are charter members of its Advisory Board. In what may have been the first such address in the United States, Mr. Nathanson presented an Ethical Culture Sunday Platform on the subject “Can We Have a Quieter New York?” Among his points: “Whatever in the environment undercuts or adversely affects people in their relationship is plainly unethical…Unquestionably the human environment we have been building in this city, as well as in cities throughout the country and the world, [has] been destructive of human well-being…A quieter city is part of the civilization we deserve and must achieve.”
Rev. Morris, Rector of St. Thomas Church in New York, asks his parishioners to use their influence to support a reasonable control of unnecessary noise. And Rabbi Klein was active in preventing the West Side STOLport from being built in the middle of a congested residential and cultural complex.
Even the business community is beginning to realize that restrictive legislation is the result, not of anti-business bias, but of the public’s dissatisfaction with abuses. Enlightened businessmen are warning their colleagues that business has a stake in preserving the city. “If we fail to improve those surroundings,” cautioned Ralph Lazarus, president of Federated Department Stores, “the resulting anger and frustration will inevitably break about our heads.” Life insurance companies, owners of some ghetto buildings, have taken out full-page ads in newspapers across the country to warn that traffic noise as well as slums is making second-class citizens of poor and rich alike.
The Portland, Oregon, Chamber of Commerce started with an environmental committee and now has added a noise subcommittee. That same city’s City Club has a committee on noise. And New York’s Board of Trade is sponsoring an all-inclusive Business Council for Environmental Protection.
Another illustration of business community involvement was the substantial contribution to CQC made by Scali, McCabe and Sloves, a young New York advertising agency. Not only did this agency prepare public service newspaper and magazine ads and radio messages, it helped out with office space and other contributions.
Even the noisemaker has begun to commit himself to noise abatement. The chairman of that New York Council is William I. Wearly, top executive of Ingersoll-Rand, manufacturers of construction equipment. James W. Wilcock, president of Joy Manufacturing Company, is on the Honorary Board of CQC. Both men are becoming leaders in the design of quieter construction equipment.
From drills for concrete to drills for teeth, manufacturers are beginning to sense a demand for quiet products. Quiet is becoming a competitive feature. Enlightened self-interest is at work.
One reason Bethlehem Steel agreed to develop a quieter metal garbage can for CQC was the threat of competition from new plastic and paper containers. Encouraged by the national and international interest in that quieter can, Bethlehem has embarked upon a new program to provide a noise control service to other users of its metal stock, manufacturers of dishwashers for one. Owens-Corning has a giant acoustic facility to help develop quieter appliances and architectural products for its clients.
Business is motivated to design for quiet by the thought of benefits from noise control, or, conversely, the threat of some form of loss. Standard Oil (New Jersey) sought goodwill when it built a new refinery. It took out institutional ads to let the public know its new installation was going to be a quiet neighbor.
At the public demonstration of his firm’s quieter giant air compressor, Ingersoll-Rand’s Wearly observed that the development of this improved equipment “reflects I-R’s concern not only to be an innovator among manufacturers of machinery, equipment and tools, but to be a good neighbor as well. Undeniably construction is a noisy business. However, it is our aim–through research–to reduce noise to a level that will not trouble citizens of the communities in which we live and work.”
Whether or not business is convinced it must design for quiet, Madison Avenue sees sales in advertising quiet, and noisemakers are not as afraid as they once were to face the issue. In 1965 the one American company with a muffled jackhammer was publicity-shy. Chicago Pneumatic Tool, since the Lincoln Center demonstration, has redesigned its brochures and devoted its midtown Manhattan ground floor window to an attractive display of its quieter tool.
Gracious living is the reward promised for using Carvel Hall’s non-motorized knives which carve silently. “Make friends with the People Downstairs,” suggests one carpet ad. “It can be done. If they don’t hear every step you take, every pin you drop, every word you say. Bedroom carpeting gives you privacy…”
Aware of a growing resistance to sleepless nights, motels are advertising that they are located away from noisy highways. The Marriott Hotel chain invites businessmen to hold their meetings at their hotels, and after dinner enjoy a quiet sleeping room.
Mobil Gas advertises that its travel guide helps motorists find a quiet place to sleep. Mobil’s inspector, the ads say, turns on all the noise sources in a motel–TV, heating, air conditioning–and then, turning them off, lies down in bed and keeps very quiet. He listens for noises from other rooms. One hopes he also listens for traffic noise and the noise of a Mobil or competitor’s truck refilling the oil tanks for the motel’s heating system.
When New York’s infamous utility Con Edison changed chiefs, the new chief, Charles Luce, admitted in full-page ads that when Con Ed dug it dug noisily. But, he added, Con Ed was now trying to do its digging more quietly, and was experimenting with silenced equipment. (It also set up a novel internal taskforce on noise abatement.)
Somehow or other the public must become aware of the significance of technological innovation before such innovations are locked-in to the environment. No sooner do we hear about an SST or V/STOL than they seem to become commercial realities. It is encouraging that the mass media are slowly starting to provide quick communication so necessary to spark the needed debates and analyses. Not only are news stories describing what is happening, editorials are pressing for curbs and control. Network TV is starting to inform the public about the dangers of amplified music and New York’s and Tokyo’s noise problems. Local TV stations, at least in New York, Philadelphia, and a few other cities are producing noise pollution panel shows and documentaries. Newsweek, Time, Life, Fortune, Esquire, Playboy and the Reader’s Digest now recognize noise pollution as part of the urban crisis.
The first “popular” national presentation of noise abatement took place on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Carson and his production staff deserve credit for demonstrating before millions of viewers the feasibility of noise control.
An unexpected dividend of that appearance may make noise abatement a household word. Actress Phyllis Newman, who was the next guest after the noise abatement segment, interjected her noise problems. and she and Carson discussed their personal noise hangups. Perhaps in the future celebrities on the widely-watched talk shows will discuss noise and similar environmental problems to which they are exposed, even as you and I.
Celebrities cannot do the job alone, and it is encouraging to report there is a trickle of volunteers in noise abatement work, people who will help with the day-to-day operations of an office. Citizens for a Quieter City, with its sometimes-less-than-shoestring budget, would not have been able to function without the year’s help of Mary Coughlin, a senior citizen who remembered her shorthand and typing; Anne Cavanaugh, who came for one week to “type some cards” and stayed for seven months until called away by marriage; Elizabeth Meffen, and Irene Ebeling, to mention a few.
Citizen movements, unless adequately financed, depend heavily on this type of participation. It is promising that noise victims are realizing they can help themselves, and others, by channeling some of their protest energy into helping an organized noise abatement operation.
It is promising too that some noise victims are reacting with directness. For example, when highway crews worked around the clock to complete a section of interstate highway near the University of Minnesota, indignant citizens telephoned the president of the construction company at four o’clock in the morning. He had not even known of their months of complaints about not being able to sleep at night. The victory they won was cessation of the project from midnight to 5:00 A.M.
More and more it appears that people are losing their tolerance for noise. If there were such a thing as a noise barometer, it would reach “Violence” on the scale of reactions. The chopping of air compressor hoses at construction sites, the shooting of bullets at low-flying jets, the actual murder of a horn-tooting motorist-these are but a few of the more startling individual incidents of violence brought on by an excessive noise problem and a frustrated citizenry.
Militant protest is becoming widespread. Noisy patrons emerging from a Paris restaurant so irritated a tenant of the building, he took his rifle and wounded five men and women.
Jet noise has provoked bomb threats and assaults with a variety of projectiles. A mother of three, living near Kennedy Airport, allegedly telephoned a threat to bomb the control tower. “I couldn’t stand it anymore, the low-flying jets,” she told a reporter. “They frightened my children, rattled the house, made me a nervous wreck.” Would milk of magnesia have relieved her tension?
A $20,000-a-year business executive, naively believing he was buying an escape from city noise, purchased a farm home near Dayton. To his extreme annoyance, he found himself under the flight path of low-flying Air Force jets. Unable to secure any accommodation, he took five shots at the jets. He was placed on probation, and forced to move.
The most publicized incident is the one involving artist Helmut Winter, the “Kartofel Werfer” of suburban Munich. Winter suddenly found his home under the flight path of low-flying Luftwaffe and U.S. Air Force jets. When his complaints, like the Dayton man’s, were to no avail, he built a modified version of the Roman ballista, a sort of powerful slingshot, and used this device as an anti-aircraft gun–loading it, however, with potato dumplings instead of shells. The frightening plop of dumpling on fuselage did what all else had failed to do: it got the flight path changed. Winter became an international hero. He won the acclaim of noise victims around the world because he had acted out–in his own fashion–what they probably had fantasized for years.
Auto horns appear to be exceptional provokers of violence. On a December day in 1966, one motorist picked an unfortunate place to honk his horn, outside a trailer camp where an obviously mentally-disturbed tenant kept a gun. The horn-happy driver was silenced, forever, with a bullet, and the sniper, after shooting it out with the police, committed suicide. He left a note explaining, “Every day from 4:00 to 6:00 P.M. the constant honking of horns made life unbearable for everyone, including me.” One wire service story noted that the radio in the killer’s trailer was blaring at the time of the incident. An attempt to mask the passing horns?
Shortly after I opened the office of CQC a friendly police official tipped me off that Con Edison* had received an unsigned typed letter threatening to “get” the jackhammer operator on Sixth Avenue who started up at such an early hour every morning on a street-opening project. No, it was not my typewriter.
Some years ago two men got together in hopes of marketing a battery-operated car for $600. The delivery date was never met because of problems of low speeds, limited driving range, high cost, and the great weight of the batteries. The two men were Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Today, more than half a century later, quiet substitutes for the internal combustion engine are still little more than promises, except that the types of substitutes have increased and the development and application show some signs of progress. Rushing to meet that 1915 delivery date, Ford now claims a breakthrough with the development of a battery that promises to meet the need for an efficient, low-cost, compact urban/suburban electric vehicle requiring only an overnight charge. Time will tell.
Engineers are going even further back in history to re-examine the Stanley Steamer. General Motors is testing a thermal engine for the Army, one reported to be extremely quiet, quiet enough for front line use. Lear Jet has been working on a virtually pollution-free steam engine for motor vehicles. HEW’s National Air Pollution Control Administration is subsidizing the design of a 100-hp steam-powered system to propel a six-passenger car at 75 mph.
Some hope for quieting larger vehicles may exist in the $300,000 grant awarded by the Department of Transportation to the Dallas Transit System to test buses driven by a non-polluting Freon-powered external combustion engine. In 1968 I rode in an experimental bus being developed at GM. Operated by a gas-turbine engine, it emitted a very low over-all noise level. If the distinct and unpleasant whine which is characteristic of these engines can be eliminated, the end result could be a comparative ear-kiss. This bus, the RTX, could be ready for production in 1972 if somebody came up with at least 3,000 orders. It is estimated that the bus will cost twice the $28,000 now paid for GM’s anti-social diesel buses. In the meantime, New York City is checking out experimental battery-operated buses.
To go from the sublime, there are experimental electric and fuel-cell motorcycles. Union Carbide claims its prototype fuelcell motorbike at 25 mph allows the spectator to hear no more than the low hum of the chain drive.
All of these vehicles ride on rubber tires. Since tire noise impedes effective motor vehicle legislation, it is promising that the National Bureau of Standards is looking into the problem of tire noise. This is somewhat more reassuring than the news that the Rubber Manufacturers Association is cooperating with GM and the Society of Automotive Engineers to develop a tire noise testing procedure. The cooperation of the Rubber Manufacturers Association has gone further than the donating of one tire for needed research: the RMA has furnished several dozen.
If one seeks hard enough, one can find what could be the seeds for future noise abatement growth, or at least evidence that some areas of government can hear what’s going on. On April 16, 1969, the Associated Press carried the information that the Birmingham, Alabama, city council had adopted a law making it illegal to operate transistor radios on city buses. It seems that the bus drivers had complained they were a distraction and kept them from hearing emergency sirens.
New York’s Mayor Lindsay refused to permit six-second commercials to be blasted at subway riders at each station stop, calling the idea an invasion of privacy that could not be justified as revenue.
One of the more promising developments, for riders of mass transit, is the Bay Area Rapid Transit System now under construction in the San Francisco Bay area. Scheduled for completion in 1972, it is being built according to specifications that have certainly heretofore been alien to American mass transit purchases. The specifications section entitled Audible Noise Control Requirements starts out with this directive: “The Supplier shall devote particular attention to the design of quiet equipment, and methods shall be incorporated in the BART transit vehicle design to attenuate that equipment noise which does not meet the noise level limitations indicated.”
There is a great deal of interest in the first “urban zone of quiet” created in the United States. This area is New York City’s Central Park, where–thanks to the innovation of former Parks Commissioner Thomas P. F. Hoving–weekend motor traffic is banned. It would be more promising if the ban extended vertically to include aircraft flyovers.
New Bedford, Mass., Director of Public Health, Alphege Landreville, told a panel on public health at the University of Massachusetts: “Somehow, local health departments must accept new responsibilities in medical care…and what is now rapidly coming to the forefront, abatement of noise.” He mentioned the wailing sirens of fire apparatus, ambulances, and police vehicles: “These are heard at all hours of the day and night and are particularly disturbing, irritating and frightening to young children who are awakened out of a sound sleep.”
Politicians, many tending to abjure leadership in favor of waiting for evidence of public demand, are sensing their constituents’ concern about the nitty-gritty of day-to-day living as well as the traditional major issues. In analyzing why Mayor Lindsay lost the Republican Primary in 1969, The New York Times reported that the major issues of crime in the streets and racial tension were not the only important factors. “Some more important factors would seem to be:…general frustration with the mundane urban crises of garbage cans, broken park benches, potholes…” In short, the environment.
Not all politicians fully respect the noise issue, though they may anticipate votes in it. One candidate for state assembly lumped together as a platform plank: “elimination of air pollution, vagrancy, noise and parking problems.” But maybe other candidates will keep alive the “Sweet Sunday” concept espoused by novelist Norman Mailer and newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin when they ran for Mayor and President of New York City’s City Council in the 1969 primary elections. Directed at air pollution, it would have required the ban of all vehicle traffic and pollution-causing machinery one Sunday a month.
Indicative of a growing Federal interest in noise abatement is the issuance of a contract by the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for new and low-cost methods and materials to cut down noise transmission within dwellings and the entrance of noise into dwellings from the outdoors. The objective is laudable, but how much new building design and construction techniques will the $160,000 grant buy?
In 1966 President Johnson challenged planners and city officials to discover why the quality of life bore no relationship to our national affluence. Two years later, at the 1968 meeting of the American Institute of Planners, the delegates could put on a set of headphones and hear a variety of disagreeable city noises played at their actual sound levels. Perhaps it occurred to them that these noises are harming the quality of city life. Perhaps they returned to their respective cities reflecting on their personal reactions to these unpleasant sounds, and related them to proposals for center-city helicopters, STOLcraft, and multiple dwelling sites next to runways and adjacent to major highways. Perhaps.
Their colleagues overseas seem to dig noise abatement. One of the most interesting developments in new-town planning is the proposed community of Woolwich-Erith to be built in a three-mile stretch of marshy area on the Thames outside of London. Sponsored by the Greater London Council with the cooperation of two other London boroughs, it is a local government project designed to meet the needs of Londoners well into the next century. Needs will include an environment protected from noise, especially traffic noise.
In this new community, traffic will be concentrated on a few main distributor roads designed to assure free-flow circulation to eliminate stop-and-go noises. To protect the community from the through road there will be an embankment on either side, and a 300-foot play area strip will be between the embankment and the first row of houses. The local distributor road will be flanked on one side by a continuous row of dwellings designed so that their living rooms face away from the noise source and toward the quiet housing areas and the sun. In this way the noise on the inner face of the buildings can be reduced as much as four times. Where the local distributor road is between the sun and the homes, a non-residential barrier building will be erected.
Expressways through cities need not be a new source of noise. The Philadelphia City Council fought the plan for an open ditch road from Independence Hall to the Delaware River. In a cooperative venture between the Bureau of Public Roads, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and the Pennsylvania Highway Department, a landscaped cover may be built over the road.
It is promising that some in government circles believe pollution should be made uneconomical. There should not be a “right to pollute.” President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee had recommended in a report that a careful study be made of tax-like systems under which all polluters would be subject to “effluent charges” in proportion to their contribution to pollution.
Another method of adding to the cost of making noise is the “amenity” grants concept, whereby people made to suffer excessive noise through no fault of their own are given some assistance in barricading their homes. The British started this concept by enabling noise-stricken householders living within 12 miles of Heathrow Airport to receive up to half the cost of soundproofing a maximum of three rooms.
A Los Angeles proposal asks that there be a $1 anti-noise use tax on each passenger and ton of cargo using the airport. The money would be used to finance soundproofing of homes, schools, and church structures in zones of high airport noise levels. There is some uncertainty about the right of a municipality to tax interstate commerce. A precedent-shattering lawsuit is being instigated by the affected Los Angeles School District against the City Department of Airports. If undertaken, this suit will answer the key question: can one government agency enjoy the right to cause another to spend large sums of money solving a problem caused by the first agency.
This fight has won the support of the Los Angeles Times, which editorialized that the airport should include as part of the cost of doing business the cost of keeping the community habitable. If the schools win this type of case, one could look forward, perhaps, to suits against the FAA to compensate for the soundproofing of the Kennedy Center in Washington, as well as to suits against airports nationwide to help pay the cost of decibel retreat.
Noise abatement conferences sponsored by public-oriented groups are becoming available for the education of private and public officials. In Europe, representatives of the construction industry, as well as a broad spectrum of public officials, attended a conference sponsored by the Austrian Federation for Noise Abatement. Instead of being indoctrinated to disregard the complaints of noise victims as neurotic behavior, they were told that the noise offenders may be having mental difficulties and be in need of psychiatric help! This was a refreshing switch. Instead of belaboring the difficulties of enforcing anti-noise law, the delegates were given the benefit of the experience of the Zurich noise control office. Instead of listening to diatribes against noise control regulations, engineers discussed the need for expanded city ordinances and more enforcement. While American building department officials had yet to include noise insulation in their area of responsibility, the Chief Buildings Commissioner of Vienna was describing the improvements in his regulations for the planning and construction of buildings.
When public officials–and private contractors–leave this type of meeting, they are equipped to cope with the specifics of noise abatement. What is more important, they leave imbued with a sense of common purpose–protection of the public.
From Honolulu to Anchorage, Alaska, from Seattle to Oregon to Los Angeles to Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York, one hears of signs of demand for an end to the tyranny of noise.
As this book was being written, there were signs that the governmental indifference to the noise issue was beginning to change. It is beginning to dawn upon our law makers and our administrators that the public’s noise complaints are valid and must be faced.
Some local governments are beginning to recognize the need for noise abatement agencies; a few state governments are moving to develop comprehensive noise abatement programs. On a national level, we now see an Office of Noise Abatement in the Department of Transportation, an Office of Noise Abatement Research and Technology in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and another attempt, this time spearheaded by Senator Muskie, to give the Department of Health, Education and Welfare a noise abatement function.
The Nixon administration has recognized noise pollution in the Cabinet-level Environmental Quality Council, and a Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. President Nixon is seeking to place all pollution problems in one environmental protection administration. The Congress was waiting for the report of a Presidential Task Force which would spell out the specific agency to be responsible for environmental matters, noise included.
The Congress itself is developing a body of environment-oriented senators and congressmen, among them a handful aware that noise, too, is a factor in environmental deterioration. Among the friends of noise abatement are Senators Hatfield, Hart, Randolph, Muskie, and Nelson, and Representatives Lowenstein, Ottinger, Ryan, and Reuss.
Noise abatement is bound to benefit from the spin-off from the Environmental Teach-In of 1970.
The ferment described in this chapter is no guarantee of the needed commitment to abate. The majority still fails to understand the need to lessen the noise assault, and among the enlightened who acknowledge “noise pollution” one finds a tendency to relegate its solution to the bottom of the heap of pressing problems. Too many fail to understand that today’s technological and congestion-instigated problems cannot be treated sequentially: air pollution first, water pollution second, noise last, etc. Technology and congestion won’t wait; if we are to survive we must attack these problems on all fronts at the same time. We have no choice.
* The source of electric power for New York City.
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