Transportation
Most Airport Noise Complaints Come From a Handful of Cranks
The vast majority of airport-noise complaints come from only a few affected households—and some that aren’t affected at all.
Anyone who hates noise would be crazy to live near an airport, right? You’d think so, but some people chose homes close to airports and choose to complain about the noise. It’s not a lot of people, but a handful of obsessives. The vast majority of airport-noise complaints come from only a few affected households—and some that aren’t affected at all.
A new paper by Eli Dourado and Raymond Russell of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center tracks airport-noise complaints to their sources. Where the data are publicly available, they show that a tiny number of households are responsible for hundreds, even thousands of complaints to airports every year.