Noise pollution is not something that we can easily see, like air or water pollution, but its effects can still be very damaging, disrupting sleep cycles, causing deafness, and overall just being unpleasant and psychologically disturbing. We all deal with it to some extent on a daily basis, given the traffic on the streets and the screeching from the trains on the subways, and some of us (like me) are unlucky enough to live close to airports. Regardless of where we live, we have unfortunately become accustomed to the noise. Just taking a day trip to the suburbs or countryside shows how much quieter and peaceful it can be there, but the relative silence becomes uncomfortable, and we sometimes miss all of the honking and music that we loathe when we are in the city. But just as all cities have extraordinarily high levels of noise, they all differ in their sources, and this article showed how even small neighborhoods, some of which border each other, can have drastically different sources of noise pollution as well.
The most interesting statistic that I found was that “311 logged more than a hundred and forty thousand noise-related complaints between the winter of 2013 and the fall of 2014. That works out to one complaint every four minutes, day in and day out, all year”, and represents one call for every sixty people, assuming that nobody made multiple calls. The article’s graphs and charts were very helpful in terms of visualizing the geography and frequency of these complaints, and it came as no surprise that most were made during the late night hours; for the city that never sleeps, it seems that sleep is one of the most important things that a New Yorker can have. Even though highly commercialized neighborhoods, especially in parts of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, have the highest number of complaints, probably given the large amounts of taxis and construction going on, residential neighborhoods in eastern Queens near Long Island or parts of Staten Island have their own sources of noise, primarily since many have single-family houses that can afford to have dogs roaming outside instead of apartments.
While the article went extremely in depth in terms of mapping the loudest areas of the city and briefly mentioned solutions, it neglected to show that noise pollution can have devastating effects on animals. Common pets like dogs and cats have a much stronger sense of hearing than we do, so we can just imagine how stressed out they can become from noises that we disregard as minimal. Even heavy vibrations from bass subwoofers in cars can reverberate in the streets and damage the ground and any habitats for animals in those areas, and they may be forced to move to new locations that are very hard for them to adjust to. This just shows how noise pollution, despite not being as tangible as other ecological problems that our city battles, is just as destructive. After reading the article, it is definitely a very broad issue that will require many different solutions catered to specific neighborhoods, but any change, no matter how small, is better than no change at all.
