55 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] thread
You need to wait a few seconds (5-ish) for the data to populate once you've selected a region on the map.

Here's the link if you want to skip the article:

https://maps.bts.dot.gov/arcgis/apps/webappviewer/index.html...

Perhaps the map is getting hugged to death right now? I can't get any data to load beyond the base geo layer.

EDIT: hmmm, seems to be a bug. I see in the console it's expecting JSON from this url: https://maps.bts.dot.gov/services/rest/services/Noise/CONUS_...

...MapServer?f=json does have JSON! It's just even when it errors it returns a successful response with the error page that's not JSON.
Anybody know if there's something like this for Canada?
There are similar maps available for Switzerland for railway noise (day/night), traffic noise (day/night), aircrafts etc.

Here's the example for daytime traffic noise: https://s.geo.admin.ch/722d116dec

In Zurich right now and just want to say: quietest big city i ever been to. Only clocks are ticking!
Agreed, as most of the buildings have great insulation or double-pane windows. Though during the summer, just don't have an open window facing a major inclined street like Universitätstrasse with constant tram and vehicle noise, and high revs up the hills (this is a major problem in SF, except many buildings are thinner and less updated). In Switzerland, one issue is the older churches ringing their bells every 15 minutes 24/7. The Swiss Noise Council is trying to limit the bell-tolling to day-time hours. http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/for-whom-toll-the-bells-_church-...
Oh, those in central part? I didn't know it was 24/7. Always hated namaz thing in muslim countries but seeing it in CH, WOW.
Maybe I ran into a bug, but this doesn't seem useful at the neighborhood level. The data simply does not have high enough fidelity. Even at the city level the gradients are too blurry to meaningfully extract neighborhood-level information.
It's pixelated and ugly at the road-level but it seems accurate at least for my neighborhood.

Will definitely bookmark for when we buy. Road noise = less desirable.

I had the same problem but after about a minute of waiting it loaded higher resolution data.
It just extrapolates noise level from traffic surveys/estimates. It isn't like they have a microphone in your neighborhood.
If you really want to know this, go take a look at Google's traffic maps, which are decently accurate. Cross reference that with some city stats on the types of car available and noise levels for makes and models and there you go. Cars and trains probably make up most of the noise levels so it's probably a decent estimate.

Sounds like a fun side project idea.

- For city level data you could either go on Autotrade and look at cars being sold in a given city over a 10 year period and hope that's a decent approximation, or somehow get car registration data.

Adding flight data to it should be no problem as well.

Then map it over period of time to see highs and lows :)

"No problem"! You underestimate the volume of data (tens of thousands of points per flight) and time needed for temporal spatial analysis.

I routinely run spatial analysis queries on a 400NM buffer around a large US airport and have spent many hours improving the efficiency of the queries due to the long run times on the largest RDS instances available. Running it for the entire national air space would be a significant project.

Edit: I pulled one random day of data - using the data source with the least frequent reporting period (ATC Center - one point every 12s) there were ~ 600,000 data points for one day of operations that arrived or departed from our facility (overflights or GA to smaller airports are easily another 15%. This is also clipped at a 400NM radius). Annualized that would ~220 million data points. If you are looking at ground noise then you would probably want to merge in the approach radar data which is approximately one point every 3 seconds for a ~60NM radius. We often run multiple years at a time. It might not be "big data" by the standards of some on HN but it's significant for many GIS shops!

(comment deleted)
Most flight trajectories can be described with perfectly fine accuracy by a low number of consecutive line segments. But yeah, storing raw radar points in some RDS is going to slow you right down. I wouldn't put signal sample data into Postgres either.
We simplify the tracks as much as possible (and convert to a geometry rather than store as raw data) but once you are in the terminal area there is a lot of value in retaining the full data set - especially when you start analyzing things like RNAV/PBN procedures or mapping noise contours.
(comment deleted)
Its interesting how far across the city the noise pollution of an airport effects
That's because the contour extends far beyond what would be perceptible to a human in an urban area (it goes out to the 35 LEQ contour).
Neat idea. Although I think it's basing this mainly (only?) on road and air traffic data. It doesn't seem to include noise generated by the railways--at least where I looked.
"Road and Aviation Noise in the United States" is at the top.

> future versions of the National Transportation Noise Map are envisioned to include additional transportation noise sources, such as rail and maritime.

That's in About.

Yes, the lack of railways significantly impacts accuracy on SF peninsula at least.
Good ole Caltrain. Or more annoyingly the freight trains that run at 2am and are even more noisy.
It's not supposed to, yet. But that is pretty important. My gf lives in an urban high-rise, and it's not noisy at all, except for the (above-ground at this point) subway that runs right next to the building.
A little useful but you could just draw the same noise map using distance from airports and large roads. Is that how the noise map was generated anyway?
The map is a bit disingenuous for airports due to the metric used and the contours shown (out to the 35 LEQ contour?!). Federal Aviation Regulation Part 150 established Ldn/DNL as the cumulative noise exposure metric for use in airport noise analyses and is used to determine mitigation eligibility (usually around the 65 DNL contour).

I suspect there are more than a few people at the FAA and airports around the country who are not impressed that the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics published this map. Community relations are hard enough without maps that use the wrong metric and show contours beyond a reasonable value in an urban area.

For those of you that don't speak "noise control":

Leq is the Equivalent Noise Level, is the energy of sound averaged over a set time period (usually an hour, the BTS site is doing it over 24 hours).

Ldn/DNL is the Day-Night Noise Level. It's basically the same as a 24-hr Leq with one difference - 10 dB is added to noise levels generated between 10:00pm and 7:00am to account for increased/sleep sensitivity at night.

My guess is that the site uses Leq because highway noise data is generally calculated using peak hour Leq and it was easier to get airport Leq data than to calculate highway Ldn data.

> My guess is that the site uses Leq because highway noise data is generally calculated using peak hour Leq and it was easier to get airport Leq data than to calculate highway Ldn data.

Agreed. They should still know better than publishing something with contours out to 35 though! There is already a push by communities to mitigate aviation noise beyond the current level - 55 DNL is a number often thrown around and that often causes debate over ambient noise levels in an urban area etc. This map is going to cause headaches and confusion with the public.

What I don't understand is why as a society we don't designate those areas non-residential to begin with.

Beneath a flight path should be warehouse / industrial and possibly commercial.

Depends on which areas you're talking about specifically, but many major US airports did start that way. Lots of neighborhoods have grown into the flight paths, not the other way around.

Why don't we keep it that way and protect bigger industrial boundaries around airports? I don't know, but it doesn't seem very realistic; it's too much prime land to control. Commercially zoned areas in every major metropolitan area have been approached, crowded, re-zoned or overtaken by residential development.

How you're affected by noise is not quite that simple, is it?

As someone who must have been a guard dog in a previous life, I can sleep absolutely fine in the middle of a busy city or next to a busy road or near an airport. But it's the noise variations that gets me. IE in residential areas outside the city it's usually very quiet at night, except when it's suddenly not. In the cities its always pretty loud so there's little sudden change of noise.

I only notice when I visit my parents. It's super quiet there and I often sleep for 10 hours or more. I never sleep that much at home with air condition noise from the neighbors and cars driving by. Sometimes when there is a power outage you suddenly notice how quite it can get without all the background noise.
It doesn't even account for all airports. I live near a Navy base and it doesn't show a thing, despite fighter jets making loops around the base. The nearby commercial airport is shown prominently, though.
I also live near a military base, and it's not accounted for either. B-52's aren't exactly quiet. Both the regional airport, and smaller airport are shown fine though.
If you look it is really a "National Transportation Noise Map" from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. I'm pretty sure those fighter jets are not considered "transportation"
I used to live near a Navy Base and their planes/helicopters would rattle the house every week. I think if they took that into account the whole city would be bright red...
It definitely accounts for airports around me.

There's a big N-S swath for SLC, and then a smaller X at PVU for the frequent flightpaths.

And a few of the airports seem wrong. Not sure if it's a bug, but check out Klamath Falls, Oregon and Bangor, Maine. The noise contour of Klamath is visibly wider than the entire Bay Area, that seems unlikely.
(comment deleted)
I was always having these gut feelings about my partner cheating on me with her boss at work but i couldn't confront her about it because i didn't want to cause any problems where there's none. Then Contact World Best Hackers: They are Set of professionals that provide Quality Hacking Services. They have series of testimonies from Their clients Worldwide,they are Proficient in Hacking every areas of ICT which include: * Hack and access DATA FROM ANY COMPANY Web Sites, he hack hack into a company email account call log,Hack Visichat Room ? Hack Flash Chat Room ? Hack Ftp User & Pass ? Hack Database ? Hack Yahoo Mail ? Hack Gmail Id ? Hack Websites ? Hack FaceBook Account ? hack Vb Forum ? Hack WordPress Blog ? hack C C any country ? hack moneybroker ACCOUNT ? hack liberty Reverse Account ? hack paypal Account ? increase your credit score today? bypass Google phone verification, ? Hash Crack ? Hack Bank Account ? increase your credit score today,online game access?hack twitter?and listened to all his calls and upgrading result making changes in database,such as your college/university grades,Retrival of lost files,preventing you from been hacked or tracked,You can reach out to him for any hack related exploit {{alandavid76@tutanota dot com} for an effective service and consider your big problems solved..
Back in the day, I often went on long bike rides in the country on clear summer nights when the moon was full. I could see well enough once my eyes had dark-adapted, it was cooler, and there were fewer motor vehicles. And it was so quiet that I could hear interstates several miles away. So basically, I was mapping quiet places. Now there's an app for that.

Edit: Now we can have crowd-sourced maps of quiet places.

Well I am an area which shows no levels but there are areas within ten or so miles. It could all change if the county officials get their way and have Atlanta's second major airport in our county (Paulding). It would explain the recent boom in housing in formerly dead/bankrupted developments which came to life again.

while some bemoan commutes and laud living in cities, noise is one of the greatest reasons to not live in one. For me the costs are worth it.

i am curious how crime rates stack with noise levels, do higher levels simply have more crime because its a similar area or does the constant noise increase stress/fatigue to lead to more crime?

The linked map is not working for me in Safari on my Mac. It only loads the base layer. It does work in Chrome on Mac.
Wow, the first time I tried to load the map it crashed the tab on Safari (iPhone 6).

The second time it crashed the whole device and forced a reboot!

Why would I what to know how noisy is my neighborhood? That's something I already know.
1. You're considering moving somewhere.

2. Too get a relative sense of how noisy it is compared to others you don't have experience with, instead of just an absolute noise value.

This. You don't know how much noise pollution you're suffering until you experience some real silence. It causes headaches and such and it's nice to know that you can get away it.
Why is Moses Lake, WA so noisy...
Having lived in LA, you do get used to the noise but I don't miss it now that I've left. There were helicopters overhead constantly, neighbors shouting at all hours, cars and sirens. Now I hear animals and the occasional train passing by. It's been a really nice change.
I keep reading "How Nosy Is Your Neighborhood". Now that would be an amazing service to offer. Maybe high ratio of calls to police for suspicious activity vs. actual crime?