Noise and the City: Why Edmonton Needs to Pipe Down

In modern discourse around urban planning, a central goal is reconfiguring urban design practices to better accommodate the human experience. After decades of auto-centric planning decisions and outcomes, it’s become clear that car dependency has brought unwanted and harmful impacts to our daily lives. With that said, one specific externality is often overlooked in my experience, yet presents a serious detriment to our physical and mental health. Today I want to discuss the topic of urban ambient noise and why we need to alleviate our ears from the hum of the automobile.

According to the Hearing Health Foundation, sounds at 70 decibels (db) and below are considered to be at a healthy ambient level. That’s about as loud as an average conversation between two people or a vacuum, and sounds above this level will most likely start to cause problems with prolonged exposure. What if I told you that areas beside an arterial road can hover between 80 and 90 db on average, and areas beside a highway can reach 100 db on average (Bureau of Transportation Statistics)? To put this in a better perspective, being in these environments can be like having a blender or drill gun operating beside you/in your ear for hours on end. Yikes.

Prolonged exposure to harmful ambient noise levels can have tangible and serious health consequences. Physical impacts can include tinnitus, hypersensitivity and hearing loss of course, however there are also strong linkages to cardiovascular illnesses and type 2 diabetes induced by stress and insomnia (Harvard Medicine Magazine). Mental health issues can arise too, such as memory impairment and attention deficit disorders. To top it off, these issues most negatively affect children as their ears and brains are still developing.

So, this is a pretty big problem, right? What can we do to fix it? Here, I’ll discuss my personal opinions and solutions, which have been informed by various articles, papers, and urbanism youtube videos.

Fundamentally, I believe we need to better define what our roads are meant to be used for. Right now, many roads (especially arterials and stroads) tend to exist in a liminal space between 1) being through ways for traffic and 2) being destinations with businesses and homes lining them. In trying to be both, they suck at doing either. 

So, I propose we take a page directly from the Netherlands’ play book and define 3 types of roads: 1) Through-roads, which are solely for high-speed and capacity vehicle travel outside densely populated areas. 2) Distributor roads, which are lower speed but still primarily meant for efficient transport of vehicles, and 3) Access roads, which are 30 km/h or lower roads where housing, businesses, and services are located. Secondly, every road needs to have traffic calming measures implemented, from narrower lanes to tree-lined boulevards to speed bumps and everything in between. Noise reduces drastically when cars move at lower speeds, so any effort to do this will help greatly. Finally, pedestrianized or, at the least, pedestrian priority areas need to become more common around our city. Not every street can or should be pedestrianized, sure, but having quieter streets in residential areas, popular commercial zones and places where children live/play will aid greatly in mitigating harmful noise impacts.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading! I hope that we, the public and planners, can work towards a less noisy future for our city.

-Written by Luka Zvonkovic