It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
Local scientist studies the Urban Loop’s noise patterns
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…Highway planners use badly flawed techniques to decide who is eligible for such noise protection.
The holes in those techniques became the focus of [Arthur] Ihrig’s months-long quest to understand how the loop — 200 feet from the house he bought in 1973 — could be so loud but not merit noise protection.
He found the “A-weighting” scale used by officials to rate traffic noise ignores huge volumes of sound, the kind of low-frequency rumbling from trucks that pierces walls like they aren’t even there.
That technique is based on a format developed in the 1930s , the A-scale, that aims to categorize the general human response to different levels of sound.
“I think they (highway officials) are using bad science,” Ihrig said. “It’s not valid in a situation like this, where you have extremely loud noise with lots of low-frequency sound.”
“He is absolutely right,” said Daniel Maguire, a well-known noise expert based in Indiana. “What they (officials) are saying is, 'We don’t give a rip about low-frequency noise.’ Yet because it’s a highway, that’s the thing they should be most concerned about.”
The Greensboro retiree’s findings also resonate with Charles Bruckner, Tar Heel representative of the New York-based advocacy group Noise Free America.
“The A-weighting scale doesn’t do anything for the lower end of the (noise) spectrum that carries farthest and actually penetrates walls,” said Bruckner, a Garner resident.
...when [Ihrig] switched to another measuring scale, the reading jumped [from 25] to 50 decibels, about the sound level of a nearby clothes dryer, which Ihrig felt was more realistic. The incident shows how lower tones missed by A-weighting can penetrate walls to disrupt daily life, he said.
State DOT doesn’t dispute that the A-scale misses lower-frequency sound.
…Maguire, the Indiana noise specialist, has found…A-weighting as an arbitrary system never meant to be applied in the way federal authorities now use it.
He suggests emulating other nations that have used modern science to develop more realistic ways of measuring the full range of noise impacts.
Numerous studies show that low-intensity noise is at least as disruptive and potentially harmful to health as higher tones, he said.
Taft Wireback, August 16, 2009
If Urban Loop noise walls will only be constructed in front of homes built before 1996…?
Urban Loop V: More traffic than previously anticipated.
City of Greensboro City Council Candidate Information Request VII:
Why did who purchase so much of Greensboro’s Urban Loop real estate
"I do not recall a case I voted on
where I was intimately knowledgeable about the Urban Loop”
City Council member Zack Matheny
said of the two years he served on the city’s Zoning Commission
before his election to the council.
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