Posted April 15, 2011
Outside Leonard Thomas’ home in North Haven, there’s a continual whir of traffic from the nearby Wilbur Cross Parkway.
In the winter it’s not so bad, he said, but it’s a real nuisance in the summer when the windows are open. Construction on the parkway’s service plazas has made the noise worse, he said.
The noise has bothered enough of his Upper State Street neighbors to prompt Sen. Leonard A. Fasano, R-North Haven, to propose a bill that calls for putting up sound barriers between the neighborhood and the highway.
Thomas knows well the direct results of the noise. His wife, who works a late shift, has trouble sleeping in the day. When they watch TV, they have to crank up the volume. “Mostly, it just a quality-of-life issue,” he said.
The exact consequences of noise in any one location are tough to pinpoint, but researchers are increasingly interested in what effects long-term exposure can have on people. Decibel levels from traffic are rarely high enough to cause hearing loss — the most obvious hazard of noise — but studies have linked traffic noise to other health conditions.
“I think that there’s some accumulating evidence that living in a noisy place is stressful and that chronic stress may be a risk factor for diseases such high blood pressure and cardiac disease,” said Peter Macgarr Rabinowitz, associate professor of medicine at Yale University. “It’s just part of our developing understanding that community noise could be playing a significant role in some chronic conditions.”
Matthias Basner, who teaches psychiatry and researches sleep at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, said noise is a stressor — anything that triggers the stress response in people — and can plausibly have cardiovascular effects.
“Traffic volume has increased incredibly in the last 20 years, even though [vehicles] are a lot less noisy,” Basner said. “The sheer mass of traffic has enhanced the problem in so many ways.”
The harder it is to escape noise, the more complaints Les Blomberg hears about it. Blomberg, founder of the Vermont-based advocacy group Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, said there was a time when people simply had to move out of the city to get some quiet.
“For the last 50 years, if you didn’t like the noise and you had the means, you moved to the suburbs,” he said. “That’s not a very successful technique anymore because the suburbs aren’t so quiet anymore.”
Studies on happiness have shown that humans are remarkably adaptable. Whatever events happen to us — good or bad — we usually return to a certain baseline of happiness. But Paul Bloom, who teaches psychology at Yale and is the author of “How Pleasure Works,” has said that constant noise is one of the few things we never get used to. If there’s long-term construction around your home, he said, your happiness drops and it doesn’t come back unless the noise goes away.
Neither Fasano nor Thomas is optimistic about the chances of the bill getting anywhere this budget season. In this economy, asking for a barriers, which cost about $1 million a mile, is a tall order. Kevin Nursick, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, wasn’t particularly encouraging either. Federal funding for sound barriers is considered only as part of highway expansion projects. Then tests are done to see how effective barriers would be.
“If you don’t do these things in a scientific manner, you could make it worse, or just deflect the sound to someone else,” Nursick said. “Then you just move the problem to some other area.”
Sound barriers have a pretty spotty record of effectiveness, Blomberg said.
“If you can reduce the noise from the source first, with either quieter pavement or quieter vehicles, that may be a better option than trying to block the noise,” said Blomberg.
Last year, George Michael Foy, a creative writing teacher at New York University, published “Zero Decibels,” a book about his hunt for true silence after getting fed up with the noise in his neighborhood. He said he still gets e-mails from people sharing their own tales noise and their search for quiet.
“I think the education about noise has only just started with the public, but there is a growing consciousness of it,” he said. “We need a respite from constant noise of all kinds. We’re just constantly subjected to it and, to my mind, there’s an overload of it.”
A few studies that have examined the effects of long-term exposure noise include:
— A 2002 study, in which German researchers reported that noise hurt the ability of children who live near airports to read and to memorize.
— A study in which more than 10,000 sawmill workers in England were tracked for eight years. Those who were regularly exposed to noises of 85 decibels — roughly equivalent to the noise of a gas-powered lawnmower — or more showed significantly higher levels of hypertension.
— A 2009 study linked highway noise to an increased risk of heart attack. Those who lived near 50-decibel levels of noise (about the same as moderate rainfall) had a 40 percent greater chance of heart attack, researchers said.
—–
To see more of The Hartford Courant, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.courant.com/.
Copyright © 2011, The Hartford Courant, Conn.