When someone shops for a new place to live, he or she is quick to notice is whether the dwelling resides near a busy street or highway. The reason for this is more than just concern for the safety of children and pets.
It’s a fear of noise pollution. The simple solution for this problem is using something to mitigate the noise. Here are four reasons to implement highway sound barriers.
To Protect Residential Areas
The average urban residential area experiences a noise level of roughly 40 decibels on the average night, 50 during the day. A similar neighborhood near a highway experiences 80 decibels or more, which causes a thrumming background noise. Anything higher than 80 decibels qualifies as potentially harmful to human ears.
While there is no way to eradicate highway sound pollution entirely, employing a sound barrier drastically reduces the amount of noise that carries. It builds a buffer that reduces noise pollution from spreading beyond the interstate into the surrounding community.
When state municipalities build roads near residential neighborhoods, they have a responsibility to add temporary construction noise barriers as well as permanent installations in order to counterbalance the new highway noise.
To Avoid Litigation
Noise pollution from interstates comes in several forms. There are truck, highway, toll road, and pavement noises. Each of them boosts the decibel level in the surrounding area, affecting more than 18 million people.
When these sounds propagate, the citizenry suffer health issues, such as sleep deprivation, nausea, and potential hearing loss. Any person who receives such injuries has the legal right to sue. Sound barriers function as a safeguard to avoid litigation.
After all, the cost of quality walls is $53 per square foot. That’s less than $4 million per mile. Contrast that frugal investment versus the potential expense of a class action lawsuit, which could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to settle.
To Protect Local Businesses
Generally, commercially licensed regions are already in busier parts of a city. Manufacturers and retailers select their buildings based upon their convenient road access. So, they already reside in the loudest places. Once the accompanying noise of interstates is added, commercial buildings face significant disadvantages overcoming noise pollution.
The ramifications impact all the affected businesses. They can lose customers and revenue, which also means that the government will cede tax revenue from potential visitors and residents of the town. Having safeguards in place to reduce the aggravation of sound pollution increases the possibility of maximized revenue for all commercial industries.
To Prevent Negative Publicity
In the social media era, word spreads immediately. If someone has a problem, he or she is literally seconds away from sharing it with everyone they know. Following the theory of Six Degrees of Separation, a person needs only a handful of social medial shares to spread the word about an issue.
Consider that premise focalized to sound pollution. If a town experiences issues with pollution, everyone will communicate this problem with others. As with industry above, citizens as well as potential visitors will feel discouraged about traveling there. Adding a highway sound barrier becomes a proactive attempt to avoid negative publicity.
Everyone needs roads to connect to the rest of civilization. Since the accompanying noise is problematic, the obvious solution is to implement sound barriers to protect the citizenship.
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