https://unsplash.com/photos/_LFDQ2zPSrc

What a nice and quiet place that looks like in the photo. Looks lovely. I want to tell you about why peace and quiet might be changing a little bit, especially in cities. I am talking about noise pollution, my favourite reason to wake up in the middle of the night.

My history with noise pollution is not very storied as I grew up in a smaller town where maybe once every six months someone would be racing around squealing their tires and making quite the cacophony. Having now moved to the big city, I have noticed that my nights of undisturbed sleep have become fewer. Last night someone was driving around doing donuts, shredding their tires into the ground and making so much noise while doing so that I couldn’t help but get up and stare at the wall until they stopped.

My anecdote aside, urban noise pollution is becoming a larger issue that is causing negative effects on people’s health. Urban Health Lab says that “chronic environmental noise exposure is associated with poor outcomes in adults and children,” some of the health issues they saw were cardiovascular disease, poor mental health, impaired sleep, and reduced cognitive performance. Urban noise pollution tends to be greatest in low-resource communities. This leads us to what can be done.

https://www.urbanhealthlab.org/noise-pollution.html

Urban noise pollution is something that can not be avoided necessarily, what can be done is that we can reduce the effects of noise pollution. The solutions outside of telling people to be quiet seem to be rather lacking at least from a governmental policy side. Although a more popular topic to broach, it still has no solutions on the table. What you and I can do is to try and keep it down as well as closing our windows if it gets too noisy out there.