Bloomberg: Restricting or banning vehicles in congested city centers pays off with cleaner air and safer streets. “We need to talk more about the other big benefit — less noise. Although still rare in North America, car-free and car-light neighborhoods have grown common in Europe, established in cities like Paris, Brussels and Pontevedra, Spain. Boosters often tout the improvements in air quality and road safety when street space is used for sidewalks, bike lanes and outdoor public space instead of transporting and storing motor vehicles. By comparison, the removal of “the roaring traffic’s boom,” to borrow Cole Porter’s phrase, garners scant attention. But its upside is very real. Apart from an occasional jackhammer, the urbanist adage really is true: Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud. Don’t just take my word for it. Researchers have found that about half of urban noise is attributable to motor vehicles. In some places the share is higher, such as in Toronto, where traffic produces about 60% of the background din. And silencing that cacophony can lead to flourishing street life — in North America as well as in Europe. Consider what happened in October 2019, when New York City banned private cars from 14th Street, a major Manhattan thoroughfare, with the goal of speeding up bus services and reducing crashes. The move was hugely controversial at the time, and a group of nearby residents filed numerous lawsuits attempting to block it. They ultimately delayed but did not kill the project. When the changes to 14th Street finally went into effect, the city’s predictions proved justified. Bus trips did indeed speed up, and crashes fell. (Despite some residents’ fears, the amount of traffic on adjacent streets barely budged.) But few seemed to anticipate what seemed to be the most popular aspect of a transformed 14th Street: the tranquility of a car-free roadway in the midst of the City That Never Sleeps. The New York Times described “a quiet that was almost eerie,” where no one “heard a single honking horn.” Others dubbed it “The Miracle on 14th Street,” and local officials promised to replicate the policy on other city roadways….It takes truly extraordinary sonic assaults to make drivers draw enough attention to warrant official sanction. Think of the “Belltown Hellcat,” the 21-year-old Seattleite who managed to infuriate an entire city by gunning his modified Dodge through late-night streets and then posting videos of his exploits on social media, in defiance of law enforcement, city officials and frazzled neighbors. (This week, the driver was arrested and barred from posting on his social media accounts.) Left unpunished are the instigators of more commonplace irritants — decibel-blasting motorists who bombard neighborhoods with revving engines, explosive exhausts and sound systems that go to 11. Recognizing the social costs imposed by obnoxiously loud machinery, London and Paris now deploy automatic noise cameras that snap pictures of vehicles when they break maximum decibel thresholds, with a ticket mailed to their registered owners. The idea has started to catch on in the US, too, with New York City and Knoxville, Tennessee, experimenting with it.

But noise cameras address only the most egregiously amplified cars and trucks; they do nothing about the background babel that is ever present in urban America, the kind that requires people to raise their voice when chatting on the sidewalk. Nor can such devices mitigate the relentless clamor endured by those living adjacent to arterials and freeways. As far back as 1981, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that nearly 100 million Americans were regularly exposed to traffic noise of at least 55 decibels, enough to cause health problems.Such ongoing noise exposure can have deadly consequences, such as increased risk of stroke, hypertension and heart attacks. A growing body of research has separated the health effects of car noise from vehicle emissions, and its findings are ominous. According to the World Health Organization, excessive noise from motor vehicles “can disturb sleep; cause adverse cardiovascular, metabolic, psychophysiological and birth outcomes; [and] lead to cognitive and hearing impairment.” A 2022 United Nations report concurred, saying that traffic noise of 60 decibels “is enough to raise heart rate and blood pressure and cause a loss of concentration and sleep.” In Denmark, a multiyear study of 2 million people aged 60 and over found that fully 11% of dementia diagnoses could be attributed to roadway noise.”