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.
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"
I also live near a military base, and it's not accounted for either. B-52's aren't exactly quiet. Both the regional airport, and smaller airport are shown fine though.
And a few of the airports seem wrong. Not sure if it's a bug, but check out Klamath Falls, Oregon and Bangor, Maine. The noise contour of Klamath is visibly wider than the entire Bay Area, that seems unlikely.
I used to live near a Navy Base and their planes/helicopters would rattle the house every week. I think if they took that into account the whole city would be bright red...
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-...
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.
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?
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.
"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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It's not supposed to, yet. But that is pretty important. My gf lives in an urban high-rise, and it's not noisy at all, except for the (above-ground at this point) subway that runs right next to the building.
"Road and Aviation Noise in the United States" is at the top.
> future versions of the National Transportation Noise Map are envisioned to include additional transportation noise sources, such as rail and maritime.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Here's the link if you want to skip the article:
https://maps.bts.dot.gov/arcgis/apps/webappviewer/index.html...