illustration by Hanna Barczyk
The horns are silenced in Ottawa, at least for the time being. The vehicles that blocked downtown streets, and the drivers who leaned on their horns day and night, are gone. The residents who complained, and held up signs saying “I want sleep,” and joined a class-action suit that successfully won an injunction to stop the noise, can rest easy.
Or can they? Now it’s back to the regular old urban din: leaf blowers and jackhammers, drag-racing cars and motorcycles that seem to have roared off the set of a Mad Max movie. The noise of an average city, while preferable to screeching air horns and bursts of fireworks, is still too loud for good health. Noise pollution is an invisible health hazard and easy to overlook, but in fact prolonged exposure to loud noise is associated with higher levels of heart disease and high blood pressure, impaired cognition and poor mental health. Not to mention damaged hearing – just ask Dave Grohl.
Most of us haven’t played drums for very loud rock bands, but if we live in cities we’re often exposed to noise at the pain threshold and are perhaps even resigned to the fact that nothing can be done about it. We accept going to sleep with earplugs and waking up with ground-down molars as the price of urban living. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Some enlightened cities are leading the way to a quieter future.
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Paris is tackling the problem by installing sensors that record excessive noise and take pictures of the roaring motorcycle or vehicle. Offenders will receive tickets of €100 (about $145), which frankly doesn’t seem like too much of a deterrent, especially when you consider the cost to human health: “Noise reduces the life expectancy of Parisians by nine months,” Paris’s deputy mayor David Belliard told The New York Times.
Those acoustic cameras are also in use in Kensington and Chelsea, one of the poshest neighbourhoods in Britain, in order to crack down on expensive sport cars that plague its streets, a move called “super fines for supercars.”
Toronto also recently pledged a crackdown on excessively noisy cars, although the last time the city tried, the mighty crackdown proved to be more of a sad little whisper. It might be time for Toronto’s leaders to reread the city’s 2017 report How Loud is Too Loud?, which lays out the many deleterious effects of excess noise.
The state of New York has gone straight to the source: the autobody shops that are illegally outfitting cars with souped-up mufflers and exhausts to make them sound supermacho. These modifications are tied to “aggressive driving that harms community health, safety and comfort,” the government of New York noted. A body shop caught turning a car into a noisemaker can be fined US$1,000.
All of these initiatives on their own might prove somewhat useful in turning down the volume, but a much broader and more holistic approach is going to be needed, according to a new United Nations report which lists noise pollution alongside wildfires as a pressing environmental threat. In Europe, around 12,000 premature deaths a year can be attributed to noise pollution, and – as is so often the case – it is poor and marginalized people who are hardest hit.
But the report holds out a lot of hope. For one thing, not all sound is created equal. The human ear is delighted by birdsong and other noises of nature, and even quite loud noises can sometimes be pleasant – Big Ben’s bonging, for example. What the report calls for is a rethinking of the urban landscape to reduce trauma to our ears, by using trees and landscaping as sound buffers, as well as reducing traffic sounds and increasing parks and other green spaces. (Paris has said it’s going to add trees as part of its sound-reduction program.)
Imagine waking up to the sound of wind in the trees, instead of your neighbour’s car alarm going off for the 10th time so that you have to hurl a can of tomatoes in the car’s general direction. (This incident may, or may not, be drawn from real life.) My entire adult life I’ve lived in big cities and mistook the racket for vibrancy: the screaming, brawling drunks in London, the news helicopters overhead in Los Angeles constantly patrolling for miscreants, the pulsing techno that boomed out of every park in Berlin at midnight.
It was actually in Berlin where I learned the power of silence as a communal force for good. Germany has a long-standing tradition of Ruhezeit, “quiet time” or “quiet hours” that mandate when noise has to be kept to a minimum. Germans will tell newcomers about bylaws preventing car-washing or vacuuming on Sundays, sort of like telling terrifying fables to children to keep them in line.
The reality is that you’re not likely to be arrested for mowing your lawn on a Sunday, but you might get a hairy eyeball from your neighbour. I once received a stern lecture from someone in another apartment after I’d put bottles in the communal recycling on a Sunday. It was verboten, even though I’d tried to do it as quietly as possible. I slunk back to my apartment and did not disturb the peace again.
Germans are very good at recognizing the regenerative power of calm and quiet, not just for themselves but for their neighbourhoods and communities. Maybe the message is beginning to spread – quietly but far and wide.
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