For the first 16 years, Fred Tilker's life on Paseo del Prado, Spanish for "meadow path," was as tranquil as the name implies.
But in recent years, the volume of pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles on the residential street in Yorba Linda has grown sharply. Noise blasts through the walls and windows of Tilker's ranch-style house.
"When the really loud ones go by, they rattle my wife's china and we have to stop talking," said Tilker, 65, a retired engineer.
His complaint to the local police chief elicited a polite letter explaining that noise was a low priority. Tilker considered moving, but his wife, Ingrid, talked him out of it. Now he is thinking about spending $17,000 on double-pane windows and joining a legion of other Americans in the pursuit of quiet.
Traffic noise is growing sharply in communities across the country -- wealthy, poor, urban, rural. The volume of vehicles, particularly heavy big rigs, has climbed steeply over the last decade. And people are driving faster, further amping up the noise.
Pickups and SUVs, which are significantly louder than cars, are proliferating on residential streets. As well, more vehicles of all types are being equipped with noisy, high-performance exhausts and powerful stereo systems.
Activists say the rising din is no mere annoyance. Noise well below levels that damage hearing can increase blood pressure, fatigue and stress, medical studies show. Researchers have found that traffic noise near schools interferes with learning.
As the racket grows, people with no escape acquire a sense of hopelessness. In a 1999 census report, Americans cited noise as their most serious complaint about their neighborhoods, surpassing even crime and concerns about public schools. Nationally, noise is the leading reason people want to move.
"They call laws that govern noise nuisance laws," said Thom de Stefano, a freelance writer in Toronto who is co-founder of Quiet Please United, which pushes for tougher laws on vehicle noise. "That's a monstrous understatement, like calling kidnapping a petty offense."
A 1999 federal housing survey in the Los Angeles-Long Beach region found that occupants of 220,000 homes were so troubled by traffic noise that they wanted to move. People in more than 1 million households noted the presence of noise in their communities, and occupants of more than half a million homes found it "bothersome," the survey showed.
For many, moving is an unattainable dream, particularly for low-income people in the noisiest locations.
Over a deafening roar from heavy trucks on the Long Beach Freeway just 30 feet away, Lewis Failes said he would leave his mobile home in South Gate if he could afford to.
Every few seconds, big rigs pass over bumps or dips in the road, jostling their 8,000-pound steel shipping containers and creating what sounds like small explosions.
"The ground shakes underneath my home," Failes, a retired draftsman, shouted on his front porch one recent morning. "It goes on all day and all night. I try to listen to music, but the vibrations make my CD player skip. I can't hear it anyway.
"It seems to get worse every day."
As communities run short of empty land, more housing is being built alongside major highways, a trend evident in fast-growing cities such as Las Vegas, Palmdale and Houston.
"Urban America is getting noisier," said Jack Freytag, director of Charles Salter & Associates, a San Francisco acoustics consulting firm. But in terms of remedies, he said, the problem "has been on the back burner because local communities can't get it together technically to understand the problem."
One result has been a surge in noise-related litigation. About 1,000 residents living along an extension of the Foothill Freeway in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties have sued the state Department of Transportation and other agencies, alleging that the road has created "intolerable noise" and cracked their home foundations since it opened 15 months ago.
The plaintiffs, who live within a quarter of a mile of the freeway, are seeking additional sound walls and other noise-reduction measures, said their lawyer, Lee Jackson. Caltrans has not filed an answer to the suit.
Other Nations Acting
Policymakers in Europe and Asia long ago woke up to noise as a public health problem.
European and Asian nations, as well as the World Health Organization, have set goals for sharply reducing noise from all sources and tightening restrictions on motor vehicles in the next few years. Japan will force its automakers to reduce car noise by more than 50% by equipping them with quieter tires and exhaust systems.
The U.S. has no national noise policy. States and localities are left to devise their own standards. The Environmental Protection Agency was empowered in the early 1970s to set federal noise rules on everything from lawn mowers to cars. But President Reagan canceled funding for the program in 1982 and shut the EPA's Office of Noise Abatement.
