Noise is closely linked to the same sickness that keeps us from solving the human problems of housing, education, civil rights, unemployment, and health care, while at the same time solving the difficult and expensive problems of faster air transportation, a national highway system, sophisticated weaponry, and a scheduled route to the moon.
Undoubtedly influenced by the carefully nurtured idea that noise is a mere nuisance, municipal government typically meets the demand for noise abatement with ignorance, indifference, or arrogance. There have been no policy positions that the human being has the right to sleep, keep from straining his vocal chords, be free from unnecessary distraction. There are no effective ordinances, administrative rulings, guidelines, or even an impartial abatement advisory service.
When a strict law is passed, it is to curb the politically impotent, like ice cream vendors.
It is a rare event for effective anti-noise legislation to be introduced into a city council, even rarer for it to become law, and rarely has it happened in America that an anti-noise law is both meaningful and commonly enforced.
Pet animals are not allowed on the streets without a leash, but undomesticated noisemakers can operate freely on the ground and in the sky. The jackhammer and the rock drill should never have been permitted inside the city limits without a promise of eventual good behavior. The city could, as we will see, move to cut down many of the excessive noises that have become characteristic of larger population centers. It could lobby in Washington to oppose environment-destroying highways and deny land for noisy airports.
Only one municipality, New York City, has so much as an official noise abatement function—so far equipped with responsibility but no authority—and only one other, Honolulu, is contemplating following suit. In between these two cities sit the thousands of indifferent governments, smug in the knowledge that most people believe you can't fight City Hall.
One would think it impossible for legislators who ignore noise abatement not to alienate constituents. But the legislator can afford to maintain the noisy status quo, because industry and the scientists back him up with their interpretation of noise control. Legislators provide the money for the very research that the noisemaker is able to cite in defense of today's noise. As we have seen, industry-oriented government actually helps originate and disseminate the propaganda that protects noisemaking by industry. In protecting each other's self-interest, industry and government are involved in a system that escalates the noise output. On the surface it is hard to understand why former Congressman Kupferman's bill calling for an office of noise control in HEW could not get out of committee. It set no standards, and in the best tradition of conservative politics, it gave most of the first year's $3 million budget back to the states and the cities. Could it be that the pro-industry agencies would not like to see a strong, centralized noise abatement function, especially in HEW?
We tend to forget that the day-to-day operation of government, on all levels, is conducted by administrative agencies. Their officials appear content to be misinformed by the noisemaker, especially if his actions mean a larger empire for a given agency. When the acting commissioner of New York's Department of Marine and Aviation was asked about the impact of a giant STOLport on that city's environment, he replied that his responsibility was to foster aviation, and what happened to the environment was somebody else's problem.
There have been illusory exceptions to government callousness. The 1956 noise study situation looked promising when Mayor Wagner initiated the Committee for a Quiet City. After four years of study it reported that noise was so dangerous it could even be a killer. Alarmed by its own conclusions, its funds exhausted, it ended its life with a vigorous campaign against horn honking.
As the years went on, the Federal government heard of noise. While the subway project continued to rattle my windows, the President's Scientific Advisory Committee received a report from a special Environmental Pollution Panel. "The public should come to recognize individual rights to quality of living, as expressed by the absence of pollution, as it has come to recognize the right to education, to economic advance, and to public recreation." Marvelous. The Magna Charta for noise abatement. But there was only one specific recommendation for noise abatement, that "the Federal government encourage the development and adoption of codes governing insulation in apartment buildings."
This lone recommendation for quiet appeared in 1965. As of 1970—nothing.
There is something grotesque about the fact that we spend ten times more on chewing gum than on mental health research, and the fact that the State of New York's Department of Mental Hygiene could not be authorized $75,000 to study the effects of jet noise on people living near airports. Even research on the hearing problems of children goes begging while scientists in Hawaii are testing tuna for their hearing capabilities.
Several years ago Representative Benjamin S. Rosenthal rebutted the head of the FAA, who had cited to a Congressional subcommittee statistics that gave the impression substantial sums were being spent on engine research: "...The fact Mr. Halaby said we are spending a million and a half dollars for engine research is just a drop in the bucket. Sir, I voted for a $10-million aquarium in the District of Columbia. I have no regrets about it. I think it is a good thing. We did that partially so that fish could have a quiet place to spawn. I think for the perpetuation of the race as I know it, at least in my district* they are entitled to the same thing as the fish—$10 million for the fish and $1.5 million for my people—there is no comparison."
More than twice as much money—$250,000 a year—is spent annually on research on Bang's Disease in cattle than on the Public Health Service budget for community and industrial noise control. It is hard to believe that the most powerful nation in the world, the nation with the technological "most," has a PHS staff of five to handle the occupational noise problems of perhaps 30 million or more workers, plus servicing the cities and the states for community noise problems.
Such Federal activity as there is focuses mainly on the jet noise problem. In 1968 Congress authorized the FAA to certificate aircraft for noise levels and to set criteria for sonic booms. Called the cat and the canary bill by the insiders, in fifteen years or so it may bring into production new aircraft of somewhat quieter levels.
There may be promise in the new Department of Transportation Noise Abatement Office, which under Colonel Charles Foster seems to be serious about tackling a wide spectrum of noise sources, not alone aircraft. Foster set up the first national conference on evaluating transportation noise. He is concerned with motor vehicle noise, and welcomes the input from the concerned citizen.
Another healthy development is the opening of government-sponsored noise control meetings to the public. The presence of the concerned citizen is a reminder that the end product of noise abatement is the human being, and not measurement or machines. If he has done his homework, he can challenge many assumptions and statements that have so far been accepted as gospel. As one example, at a Department of Transportation symposium on evaluating criteria for transportation noise, a spokesman for the automotive industry gave the impression that it was busy tackling the problem of effective noise standards. I asked this simple question:
"The automotive industry once told the City of New York it was setting up a committee to work on standards for the auto horn. That was in 1930. It is now 1969. Has the committee been formed and has it submitted its report?"
You know the stunned answer.
Noise-abatement crusading has its delicious moments, and that was one of them.
* The 8th, Queens, New York.