
How Noisy Is Your Neighborhood? - happy-go-lucky
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/23/521227214/how-noisy-is-your-neighborhood-now-theres-a-map-for-that
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11thEarlOfMar
You need to wait a few seconds (5-ish) for the data to populate once you've
selected a region on the map.

Here's the link if you want to skip the article:

[https://maps.bts.dot.gov/arcgis/apps/webappviewer/index.html...](https://maps.bts.dot.gov/arcgis/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=a303ff5924c9474790464cc0e9d5c9fb)

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city41
Perhaps the map is getting hugged to death right now? I can't get any data to
load beyond the base geo layer.

EDIT: hmmm, seems to be a bug. I see in the console it's expecting JSON from
this url:
[https://maps.bts.dot.gov/services/rest/services/Noise/CONUS_...](https://maps.bts.dot.gov/services/rest/services/Noise/CONUS_road_and_aviation_noise/MapServer)

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dvcc
...MapServer?f=json does have JSON! It's just even when it errors it returns a
successful response with the error page that's not JSON.

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ebrewste
It doesn't even account for all airports. I live near a Navy base and it
doesn't show a thing, despite fighter jets making loops around the base. The
nearby commercial airport is shown prominently, though.

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mohaine
If you look it is really a "National Transportation Noise Map" from the Bureau
of Transportation Statistics. I'm pretty sure those fighter jets are not
considered "transportation"

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folli
There are similar maps available for Switzerland for railway noise
(day/night), traffic noise (day/night), aircrafts etc.

Here's the example for daytime traffic noise:
[https://s.geo.admin.ch/722d116dec](https://s.geo.admin.ch/722d116dec)

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homakov
In Zurich right now and just want to say: quietest big city i ever been to.
Only clocks are ticking!

~~~
nshelly
Agreed, as most of the buildings have great insulation or double-pane windows.
Though during the summer, just don't have an open window facing a major
inclined street like Universitätstrasse with constant tram and vehicle noise,
and high revs up the hills (this is a major problem in SF, except many
buildings are thinner and less updated). In Switzerland, one issue is the
older churches ringing their bells every 15 minutes 24/7\. The Swiss Noise
Council is trying to limit the bell-tolling to day-time hours.
[http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/for-whom-toll-the-bells-
_church-...](http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/for-whom-toll-the-bells-_church-
bells-charm-and-annoy-their-listeners/40807288)

~~~
homakov
Oh, those in central part? I didn't know it was 24/7\. Always hated namaz
thing in muslim countries but seeing it in CH, WOW.

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enraged_camel
Maybe I ran into a bug, but this doesn't seem useful at the neighborhood
level. The data simply does not have high enough fidelity. Even at the city
level the gradients are too blurry to meaningfully extract neighborhood-level
information.

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adolph
It just extrapolates noise level from traffic surveys/estimates. It isn't like
they have a microphone in your neighborhood.

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Shivetya
Well I am an area which shows no levels but there are areas within ten or so
miles. It could all change if the county officials get their way and have
Atlanta's second major airport in our county (Paulding). It would explain the
recent boom in housing in formerly dead/bankrupted developments which came to
life again.

while some bemoan commutes and laud living in cities, noise is one of the
greatest reasons to not live in one. For me the costs are worth it.

i am curious how crime rates stack with noise levels, do higher levels simply
have more crime because its a similar area or does the constant noise increase
stress/fatigue to lead to more crime?

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tabeth
If you really want to know this, go take a look at Google's traffic maps,
which are decently accurate. Cross reference that with some city stats on the
types of car available and noise levels for makes and models and there you go.
Cars and trains probably make up most of the noise levels so it's probably a
decent estimate.

Sounds like a fun side project idea.

\- For city level data you could either go on Autotrade and look at cars being
sold in a given city over a 10 year period and hope that's a decent
approximation, or somehow get car registration data.

~~~
solidr53
Adding flight data to it should be no problem as well.

Then map it over period of time to see highs and lows :)

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knz
"No problem"! You underestimate the volume of data (tens of thousands of
points per flight) and time needed for temporal spatial analysis.

I routinely run spatial analysis queries on a 400NM buffer around a large US
airport and have spent many hours improving the efficiency of the queries due
to the long run times on the largest RDS instances available. Running it for
the entire national air space would be a significant project.

Edit: I pulled one random day of data - using the data source with the least
frequent reporting period (ATC Center - one point every 12s) there were ~
600,000 data points for one day of operations that arrived or departed from
our facility (overflights or GA to smaller airports are easily another 15%.
This is also clipped at a 400NM radius). Annualized that would ~220 million
data points. If you are looking at ground noise then you would probably want
to merge in the approach radar data which is approximately one point every 3
seconds for a ~60NM radius. We often run multiple years at a time. It might
not be "big data" by the standards of some on HN but it's significant for many
GIS shops!

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revelation
Most flight trajectories can be described with perfectly fine accuracy by a
low number of consecutive line segments. But yeah, storing raw radar points in
some RDS is going to slow you right down. I wouldn't put signal sample data
into Postgres either.

~~~
knz
We simplify the tracks as much as possible (and convert to a geometry rather
than store as raw data) but once you are in the terminal area there is a lot
of value in retaining the full data set - especially when you start analyzing
things like RNAV/PBN procedures or mapping noise contours.

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encoderer
Trulia provides a great way to visualize traffic noise in a neighborhood:

[https://www.trulia.com/MA/Boston/#map-live-well-traffic-
volu...](https://www.trulia.com/MA/Boston/#map-live-well-traffic-volume)

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knz
The map is a bit disingenuous for airports due to the metric used and the
contours shown (out to the 35 LEQ contour?!). Federal Aviation Regulation Part
150 established Ldn/DNL as the cumulative noise exposure metric for use in
airport noise analyses and is used to determine mitigation eligibility
(usually around the 65 DNL contour).

I suspect there are more than a few people at the FAA and airports around the
country who are not impressed that the U.S. Bureau of Transportation
Statistics published this map. Community relations are hard enough without
maps that use the wrong metric and show contours beyond a reasonable value in
an urban area.

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Anechoic
For those of you that don't speak "noise control":

Leq is the Equivalent Noise Level, is the energy of sound averaged over a set
time period (usually an hour, the BTS site is doing it over 24 hours).

Ldn/DNL is the Day-Night Noise Level. It's basically the same as a 24-hr Leq
with one difference - 10 dB is added to noise levels generated between 10:00pm
and 7:00am to account for increased/sleep sensitivity at night.

My guess is that the site uses Leq because highway noise data is generally
calculated using peak hour Leq and it was easier to get airport Leq data than
to calculate highway Ldn data.

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knz
> My guess is that the site uses Leq because highway noise data is generally
> calculated using peak hour Leq and it was easier to get airport Leq data
> than to calculate highway Ldn data.

Agreed. They should still know better than publishing something with contours
out to 35 though! There is already a push by communities to mitigate aviation
noise beyond the current level - 55 DNL is a number often thrown around and
that often causes debate over ambient noise levels in an urban area etc. This
map is going to cause headaches and confusion with the public.

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mjevans
What I don't understand is why as a society we don't designate those areas
non-residential to begin with.

Beneath a flight path should be warehouse / industrial and possibly
commercial.

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dahart
Depends on which areas you're talking about specifically, but many major US
airports did start that way. Lots of neighborhoods have grown into the flight
paths, not the other way around.

Why don't we keep it that way and protect bigger industrial boundaries around
airports? I don't know, but it doesn't seem very realistic; it's too much
prime land to control. Commercially zoned areas in every major metropolitan
area have been approached, crowded, re-zoned or overtaken by residential
development.

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eisrep
Neat idea. Although I think it's basing this mainly (only?) on road and air
traffic data. It doesn't seem to include noise generated by the railways--at
least where I looked.

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mentat
Yes, the lack of railways significantly impacts accuracy on SF peninsula at
least.

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kosievdmerwe
Good ole Caltrain. Or more annoyingly the freight trains that run at 2am and
are even more noisy.

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lacampbell
How you're affected by noise is not quite that simple, is it?

As someone who must have been a guard dog in a previous life, I can sleep
absolutely fine in the middle of a busy city or next to a busy road or near an
airport. But it's the noise variations that gets me. IE in residential areas
outside the city it's usually very quiet at night, except when it's suddenly
not. In the cities its always pretty loud so there's little sudden change of
noise.

~~~
maxxxxx
I only notice when I visit my parents. It's super quiet there and I often
sleep for 10 hours or more. I never sleep that much at home with air condition
noise from the neighbors and cars driving by. Sometimes when there is a power
outage you suddenly notice how quite it can get without all the background
noise.

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cdransf
Having lived in LA, you do get used to the noise but I don't miss it now that
I've left. There were helicopters overhead constantly, neighbors shouting at
all hours, cars and sirens. Now I hear animals and the occasional train
passing by. It's been a really nice change.

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eappleby
A friend of mind built an app called SoundPrint
([https://www.soundprint.co/](https://www.soundprint.co/)), which helps people
find venues based on their noise level. Similar idea.

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Mathnerd314
Also see a similar map by the National Park Service:
[https://www.nps.gov/subjects/sound/soundmap.htm](https://www.nps.gov/subjects/sound/soundmap.htm)

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ballenf
I keep reading "How Nosy Is Your Neighborhood". Now that would be an amazing
service to offer. Maybe high ratio of calls to police for suspicious activity
vs. actual crime?

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soperj
Anybody know if there's something like this for Canada?

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amalag
A little useful but you could just draw the same noise map using distance from
airports and large roads. Is that how the noise map was generated anyway?

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BoorishBears
Wow, the first time I tried to load the map it crashed the tab on Safari
(iPhone 6).

The second time it crashed the whole device and forced a reboot!

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tzs
The linked map is not working for me in Safari on my Mac. It only loads the
base layer. It does work in Chrome on Mac.

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mirimir
Back in the day, I often went on long bike rides in the country on clear
summer nights when the moon was full. I could see well enough once my eyes had
dark-adapted, it was cooler, and there were fewer motor vehicles. And it was
so quiet that I could hear interstates several miles away. So basically, I was
mapping quiet places. Now there's an app for that.

Edit: Now we can have crowd-sourced maps of quiet places.

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stvnbn
Why would I what to know how noisy is my neighborhood? That's something I
already know.

~~~
gpm
1\. You're considering moving somewhere.

2\. Too get a relative sense of how noisy it is compared to others you don't
have experience with, instead of just an absolute noise value.

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gkya
This. You don't know how much noise pollution you're suffering until you
experience some real silence. It causes headaches and such and it's nice to
know that you can get away it.

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tbirrell
Its interesting how far across the city the noise pollution of an airport
effects

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knz
That's because the contour extends far beyond what would be perceptible to a
human in an urban area (it goes out to the 35 LEQ contour).

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s0rce
Why is Moses Lake, WA so noisy...

