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.
