Yet More Evidence for the Social Cost of Driving: Road Noise

The environmental cost of car-reliance in cities typically focuses on air pollution, and all the damage particulate matter does to human lungs and lives. But road noise also has an impact on health and well-being—and it’s hardly a trivial one, as shown by new study published in the European Heart Journal. Let’s take a closer look at what the research team calls “the largest study to date to investigate environmental noise and cardiovascular disease in the general population.”

The public health scholars, led by Jaana Halonen of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, focused on the Greater London area inside the M25 ring motorway—a study population of some 8.6 million residents. They modeled annual traffic noise from 2003 to 2010 along some 63,000 road links. They split the noise into daytime (7 a.m. to 11 p.m.) and night, and categorized it as being below or above 55 decibels, a health threshold established by the World Health Organization.