Birds respond to a half-century soundscape reversion during the COVID19 shutdown | Hacker News Reader

Birds respond to a half-century soundscape reversion during the COVID19 shutdown

science.sciencemag.org

91 pointsboulos19 comments

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I live in a small town in Washington in a long river valley. I'm about 2km from the nearest forest. I've lived here several years. I live about half a mile from a highway, and directly on a main road.

During the initial lockdown, traffic on the highway stopped. Traffic on the main road stopped. Things got very quiet. And then something else happened about 5 days in.

I smelled the forest. Not just a whiff, but a strong smell of "hey dummy, you live next to a forest and just realized you've been missing the smell the whole time." I also noticed the sky was clearer.

So, am I surprised that birds noticed, too? Not at all. I'm surprised that more humans didn't notice.

I'm absolutely LOVING that airplanes fly over every 48 hours where I'm at instead of 5 - 10 times a day.

Me too. And I'm in the Bay Area, normally multiple aircraft are visible on a clear day at any time.

I'm near enough to SJC that usually I hear most of the landing flights (unless the runway is reversed on those funny wind days.) Your comment made me think about the last time I actually heard an aircraft landing, and it made me think that the aircraft have also gotten quieter while landing. It certainly seems to me that even when they fly overheard now, they're somewhat quieter. My only guess is that the planes are flying lighter, and thus can run their engines a little bit slower and thus reduce the noise?

"noise levels in urban areas were dramatically lower during the shutdown, characteristic of traffic in the mid-1950s"

Thats just said. 70 years of innovation and we don't even have noise under control, let alone climate change.

This is likely due to the federal government stopping the federal noise control program in the early 80s [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_Control_Act

Cool another awesome government program shut down during the Reagan years, I assume to provide more money for locking up people for buying drugs.

Can't sell arms to embargoed countries or support freedom fighters financially by reducing domestic noise pollution. (Or maybe one can: construction projects are large enough one might be able to launder in the noise, and I just lack the actuarial savvy to figure out how the triangular trade would work?)

This is a pretty short Wikipedia article. It's the the hum of tires on a nearby, busy highway/freeway that tend to make most of the noise. How did they intend on "controlling" the noise from vehicles without completely removing busy roads from urban areas?

Some freeways, especially near more affluent communities, do have sound padding walls to help mitigate sound. Presumably a regulatory body would be advocating for making those part of the code, alongside helping developing new technology.

There was a good 99% Invisible recently on those headlight reflectors embedded in the asphalt, that’s a good example of where constraints (No lights during WW2 for fear of bombing) created the atmosphere for innovation. Regulations can artificially create those constraints as well.

What's wrong with removing busy roads from urban areas? The idea has been tried many times in many European cities and it has been proven to be an excellent idea almost every time.

Making city centers into pedestrian zones with bike paths and a few bus lanes passing through does wonders for sound levels, safety, makes getting around easier, improves air quality and make the city centers more alive and pleasant.

[Here is a report by the European Commission](https://ec.europa.eu/environment/pubs/pdf/streets_people.pdf) that analyses the effects of reclaiming streets from cats in eight different cities.

They've been making progress very slow progress in downtown Portland in promoting some of these things, which I appreciate frankly. But I really wonder what you do with the suburbs. Perhaps, rapid urbanization? But that may push more people to suburbanizing even more, and you need these arterial roads to get traffic between the suburban and downtown/more condensed areas.

I think it would be interesting to investigate the motives for suburban <-> urban area commutes and try to eliminate them first.

It's semi trucks. Most of the tire and wind noise from highways is semis. And maybe 90% of road wear.

They aren't forced to pay for any of this, so semis end up subsidized heavily by taxpayers

I don't disagree - but we would be subsidizing them anyway through higher cost of goods - since the only reason they are running around on the freeways is to deliver shit.

This pandemic probably opens up a ton of possibilities that wouldn't be feasible otherwise; how else would you ask most of the population to stop moving around all the time?

it's truly a window into an alternate view of our reality, remote office contributes more personal time otherwise spend on commuting thereby also contributes better air and audio quality etc etc ... like dominoes, chain of events affecting everything around us, for better or worse, let us chuckles and ponders "is this how humanity will end?"

Full article: https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2020-09-25/94/10.1126@science.a...

For more on this, see the extremely interesting book 'Noise Matters' by Haven Wiley: https://g.co/kgs/pTKgsd

#bestpandemicever

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