Car Traffic Noise Dangerous
The image above is the noise map for San Francisco. The orange and red areas are the loudest, and therefore the most detrimental to human health. For a PDF version, click here.
Noise pollution, caused primarily by auto traffic, is dangerous to some folks’ health:
Noise from traffic is putting nearly 1 in 6 San Francisco residents at risk for heart disease, high blood pressure and other stress-related illnesses, city public health officials have found.
The San Francisco Department of Public Health has ranked “highly annoyed” areas of the city - neighborhoods it says have noise so loud and so constant it could cause psychological and physical harm.
“There are real health impacts,” Tom Rivard, senior environmental health specialist for the Department of Public Health, said Tuesday.
We all knew how bone-shakingly loud cars and trucks could be, but this is hard data that shows just one more way automobile traffic is fundamentally incompatible with city life (if not incompatible with all life everywhere). You could notice it during Sunday Streets, when things just seemed so peaceful. You could notice it when sitting in a park on PARK(ing) Day.
It would be nice if we could compare audio samples, side-by-side, of noise levels during a regular traffic day, compared to the noise levels at the same location during a Sunday Streets-type event, where auto-traffic is eliminated in favor of human traffic.
The Chronicle’s Thin Green Line blog has more.
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