“People think, ‘Oh we need electricity from solar panels, we need x-y-z system, we need to use less water,” Jones says. “But we absolutely have to make living in denser urban environments pleasant to the senses, or we’ll lose the environmental battle.”
Maybe it’s time to start looking at townhouses and bus shelters with the same acoustic care engineers have long given to concert halls and schools. In doing so, it’s possible we could make the city sound not just quieter – but, in a very real way, more pleasant. …
The main wash of noise in cities today comes primarily from road traffic, HVAC units and aircraft. The Federal Aviation Administration has been working on this last one, and HVAC units are getting more sophisticated, too.
There are more and more hybrids on the road every year, and they present an intriguing opportunity for acoustic engineers. Hybrids and electric cars are practically silent. In fact, they’re so silent it’s becoming a safety problem. Eventually, designers will have to impose some kind of sound on these vehicles, a prospect that delights Antonio and other acoustic engineers starting to debate this question.
“What we effectively have at the moment is a blank canvas,” he says.
I think it is the sound of tires-on-asphalt that create the majority of traffic noise, especially on streets and roads with little to no truck traffic. I’m not sure what can be done about that from the tire techonology end of things. Instead, if cities wish to get serious about road noise then lowering travel speeds will have a measurable effect.
With regards to hybrids being too quiet, I think the idea of making them play sounds is preposterious. I sincerely believe that most of the pedestrian-hybrid issues that arise take place in parking lots and parking structures where there is virtually no provision for pedestrians. In these urban conditions quiet cars car and issue for the elderly, the inattentive, and the distracted. Rather than require all cars of a certain type to nake noise, let’s instead fix the pedestrian-car interface issues.
In parts of Europe when a freeway passes by a city or town there are walls up to block the sound of it. They take living well seriously there and quietness is important.
I agree that many places like parking lots just don’t have anywhere to walk in them. I don’t know how the designers figured people would get from their cars to the stores.
I agree with David — the idea that hybrids don’t make enough noise, so we should add some, is preposterous. It’s like the people in Scotland who say that population is going to decline so people need to have more babies. Noise decline and population decline are good things. It’s the systems that make them appear as problems that we need to change.