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.