With the End of the Cold War, Europe Now Faces Wall of Noise

Near the A-114 highway onramp in the crowded eastern Berlin district of Prenzlauerberg, it’s easy to understand why harried locals long for the peaceful isolation of the Communist era.

Drivers in Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs race their engines as they idle at stoplights. Eighteen-wheelers ferrying freight to the center of this bustling metropolis screech to a crawl to negotiate their perpetual backups. Jackhammers and air compressors at construction sites rattle and hiss in an earsplitting chorus punctuated by blaring horns, clanking trams and Soviet-made aircraft roaring overhead.

In the more than nine years since the Berlin Wall fell, eastern areas of this once and future German capital have been scaffolded and road-blocked for seemingly endless renovations. And on both sides of the now-unified city, traffic has grown exponentially as more drivers and truckers from across Europe use Berlin as a through route.

That has jacked up the noise level at dozens of high-traffic sites here to levels that exceed accepted safe limits and are contributing to the growing volume of noise pollution on the Continent.

Noise is a problem in all major cities in Europe, and environmentalists and social scientists contend that the shrieks and roars of urban life may be more than just an irritation.

German environmental authorities have documented a greater risk of heart attacks among people exposed to excessive noise, and they are finding new evidence of noise’s long-suspected ill effects on sleep and emotional well-being.

Investigation of the lifestyles of German cardiac patients has shown about a 25% greater chance of heart attacks among those whose work or home environments were persistently exposed to noise above 65 decibels, says Hartmut Ising, a researcher with the Federal Environmental Agency’s Institute for Water, Soil and Air Hygiene who has pioneered inquiries into the physiological effects of noise exposure.

“Before, experts throughout the world accepted that noise annoys people and, if loud enough, can lead to deafness, but otherwise it has always been thought to have no effect on the body,” says Ising, who has long believed otherwise.

An 11-year research project involving more than 1,000 heart patients found that noise, especially when it disrupts sleep, produces stress hormones that accelerate aging and heart disease, Ising says.

Yet further study into the heart risks is needed to convince industry and urban planners that decisive action must be taken to reduce noise levels in busy cities, says Ising, noting that medical studies for decades have focused exclusively on hearing impairment.

Normal traffic generally produces noise of about 70 decibels, while heavy traffic reaches levels of about 90 decibels. A chain saw’s noise measures about 105 decibels.

Scientists from all 15 European Union countries who are drafting a common noise policy estimate that excessive racket costs governments as much as 2% of gross domestic product in lowered productivity, increased accidents and more-frequent illness.

“Governments could actually save money if they reduced noise in the most affected areas, but we are a long way from getting politicians to understand this,” says Hugo Lyse Nielsen of the Danish Environment and Energy Ministry, which is coordinating the EU noise policy project.

Unlike water and air pollution, noise emissions dissipate quickly, and their long-term influences on society are harder to track, Nielsen says.

Eighty million people, or about one in four EU residents, suffer noise exposure that affects their job performance, he says, referring to the first results of the working group’s research into noise hazards.

Another 170 million Europeans live in borderline areas where traffic, construction and aircraft noises only occasionally exceed the accepted 65-decibel “safe” limit.

Most of those areas are expected to get worse and to clearly break the ceiling as travel and transport on the Continent continue to accelerate.

The EU project is in its infancy, since the bureaucrats from Brussels launched the quest for harmony among their member states’ regulations and measurements of noise only two years ago.

“The biggest problems are, logically, in the biggest cities--London, Paris, Rome, Berlin,” says Nielsen, noting that no comparative noise index has been established yet but that one of the EU working group’s tasks will be to map sources of noise and volumes.

Most city noise stems from automobile traffic, and Nielsen laments that car use in most major European cities continues to climb despite campaigns to encourage more reliance on mass transportation.

Islands of serenity exist in some urban centers, such as Copenhagen, where 50% of the work force walks or rides a bicycle to work and much of the rest commutes by train or bus.

Although public tolerance of environmental disturbances is notoriously low in Northern European countries, noise researchers are finding less concern--and less willingness to fund improvements--in the EU’s Mediterranean member countries, which are more accustomed to clatter.

“In Italy, Greece and Spain, people have lived for a long time with higher noise levels because of the number of motorcycles and air conditioners,” says Kyriakos Psychas, noise project manager at the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen. “Perhaps because these are sources that are seen as improving the quality of life, fewer people are bothered by them.”

Getting people to comply with noise regulations under such circumstances is difficult, Psychas says, unless other inducements are in play. In Athens, his home city, he recalls, police managed to get compliance with motorcycle speed limits only when stiff fines were imposed on violators.

Perception of noise also can be influenced by such factors as the desirability of the activity generating it, researchers say. Denmark’s thousands of modern windmills emit a loud hum, but Danes tend not to complain because they find it preferable to the quieter but unwelcome option of nuclear power, Nielsen says.

Still, northern member states of the EU assign higher value to urban calm. In Germany, laws governing the larger cities usually restrict hours when apartment dwellers can run water or flush toilets and forbid the disposal of glass, metal and other trash late at night or on Sundays. Even smaller towns tend to have hours for the use of lawn mowers and other noisy outdoor equipment.

In this most litigious of European countries, urbanites irritated by the escalating noise of city life are increasingly resorting to lawsuits to vent their frustration.

“The city shouldn’t allow so much traffic onto such a narrow residential street,” insists Bernd Wolff, a 48-year-old engineer whose second-floor apartment on Schildhorn Street in Berlin is passed every day by 60,000 cars taking a shortcut between two major freeways. “I know city life is never completely quiet, but this is ridiculous. And there’s a very simple solution--close the autobahn exit.”

Wolff is one of dozens of Berliners who have filed suit against the city, alleging dereliction of duty by urban planners. Like most other litigants, he says he remains fairly healthy but worries about the long-term effects of living with the constant rush of traffic noise above the 65-decibel level.

City authorities, however, contend that resolving one neighborhood’s noise problems would simply shunt those problems onto another locale.

“If you prohibit traffic from using Street A, it just moves on to Street B. It doesn’t disappear,” says Karl-Heinz Winter, an advisor with the city’s Agency for Construction, Housing and Transport.

Winter and other government officials point out that much has been done to tone down traffic noise.

German and EU regulations now limit not only exhaust but noise emissions from new cars, trucks and aircraft, although no regulations have been imposed on the predominantly state-owned railroads in the region.

A handful of inner-city neighborhoods and busy freeway interchanges that abut residential areas are under “night-driving bans,” which prohibit heavy trucks between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

Similarly, night-flight bans are in effect at two of Berlin’s three airports, Tegel and Tempelhof, says Werner Bochynek, a municipal official charged with balancing environmental considerations with the need for landing slots.

Berlin’s plethora of construction projects promises to keep the volume on high for the next five to 10 years, as the old cobblestone streets of the eastern areas are upgraded and widened, and as buildings that were left to deteriorate for four decades are renovated or replaced.

And those tracking the city’s evolution from divided Cold War front line to de facto capital of a united Europe see no relief ahead for the more disturbing problems of road and air traffic noise.

“Very little of this is temporary,” Michael Zschiesche, a lawyer with Berlin’s Independent Institute for Environmental Issues, says of the rising noise levels since East Germany was absorbed into the West with reunification in 1990.

“And reversing the course is going to be very difficult. Even if traffic could be cut in half, noise would be reduced by only about 3 decibels. That’s nothing,” he says.