Sounding Off on Noise

In South Gate, the owner of a mobile home abutting the Long Beach Freeway nailed a layer of drywall to the back of his home to muffle the incessant freeway din that keeps him awake.

In Claremont, a man who lives a quarter-mile from the newly expanded Foothill Freeway has tried sleeping with earplugs to drown out the roadway racket. In the Orange County community of Rossmoor, several residents have installed double-pane windows and sound-muffling wall insulation to quiet the San Diego Freeway -- even after the state extended a 12-foot concrete sound wall by four feet.

Traffic noise is an irritating fact of life in a densely packed metropolis crisscrossed by some of the nation’s most heavily traveled freeways. But experts say the problem has grown worse in Southern California over the last decade, creating both mental and physical health hazards.

The reasons: Rush hour has extended from dawn to beyond dusk. Thundering big-rig trucks make up a larger portion of the daily traffic. Overused freeways have continued to deteriorate, creating a cacophony when cars and trucks rumble over potholes, cracks and worn pavement. And builders are shoehorning more homes into areas within earshot of bustling freeways.

For many freeway neighbors, the noise has made life increasingly difficult. Some blame the racket for health problems, declines in property values and a quality of life that drops further with every screeching tire or rumbling big rig.

“I tell you, my blood pressure has definitely gone up,” said Christopher Sabatino, a chiropractor who lives about 80 yards from the Ventura Freeway in Studio City.

Sabatino is among more than 1.1 million people in Los Angeles County who live within 1,000 feet of a freeway, a Times analysis of Census 2000 data found. That is close enough, according to federal standards, for noise to be a problem.

Use of Sound Walls

To protect freeway neighbors from the din, California has led the nation in building freeway sound walls. Still, fewer than one-third of the freeways in L.A. County have sound walls on both sides. And now the state’s budget crisis threatens to jeopardize funding for the primary noise muffling program.

“There is clearly a huge need for sound walls, beyond the amount of money we have available,” said Carol Inge, a deputy director for planning for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees sound wall funding in Los Angeles County.

The MTA is working to complete 78 sound wall projects -- totaling 131 miles -- over the next decade, at a cost of at least $485 million. But the budget crisis prompted Gov. Gray Davis to cut $1.6 billion in transit and highway programs proposed in 2000. How many of those sound walls will be delayed or eliminated because of the crisis is still uncertain, state officials say.

The health consequences of living near a freeway have been documented in several recent studies.

Daily exposure to traffic noise can cause hearing loss, elevated blood pressure, increased risk of heart attack, dulled long-term memory, impaired speech perception and shortened attention span, according to medical studies. And children exposed to even low-level noise may face lifelong learning problems, according to Cornell University researchers.

Sound intensity is measured in decibels, on a logarithmic scale in which a small increase in the number of decibels represents a great increase in intensity.

A busy freeway or large thoroughfare typically generates between 70 and 75 decibels -- the equivalent of a sewing machine or a vacuum cleaner at a distance of three feet. Any sound above 85 decibels can cause hearing damage, but lower levels of noise also can cause hearing loss after extended exposure.

But even if freeway neighbors suffer no health consequences, experts say, the din of traffic can certainly make life miserable.

“If people cannot open a window, cannot fall asleep at night, cannot be in the backyard and cannot listen to television, they are not living a good quality of life,” said Arline Bronzaft, a noise pollution researcher from New York.

That is the case for Elliot Barkan, a Cal State San Bernardino professor who lives about a quarter-mile from a new 14-mile stretch of the Foothill Freeway in Claremont that opened in November.

Starting about 4:30 a.m., Barkan said, his home of 30 years is invaded by a high-pitched roar that disrupts his sleep, frays his nerves and boils his blood. The roar continues well past 11 p.m.

Most of the new freeway extension is lined with sound walls. But near Barkan’s home the freeway rises over a creek, sending traffic noise down on his neighborhood from above the wall. He said state workers have measured the noise as high as 74 decibels.

Barkan has tried to sleep wearing earplugs, but the plugs won’t stay in place. He recently paid a contractor $1,500 to equip his home with double-pane windows, but the extra-thick glass helps only if he stays indoors.

“It’s aggravating when you walk outside the door and you are overwhelmed by it,” he said.

Property Values Suffer

Traffic noise can fray property values as well as nerves.

A 1996 study by two professors from UC Davis found that traffic noise in the United States has reduced property values in 377 urban areas by about $5 billion. The study, by Mark Delucchi and Shi-Ling Hsu, did not estimate the loss of property value in Los Angeles County specifically, but it did estimate that more than 388,000 homes in the county are close enough to freeways to lose value because of traffic noise.

In South Gate, Ruben Ortiz, a retired mechanical engineer, added a layer of drywall to the back of his mobile home to cut the noise from the Long Beach Freeway, a heavily rutted and worn route that carries thousands of big-rig trucks each day to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. A two-lane frontage road and a rusty chain-link fence are all that separate his home in the Thunderbird Villa Mobile Home Community from the freeway.

But Ortiz said the drywall does nothing to quiet the loud rumbles that occasionally jolt him and his wife out of bed when a truck strikes a rut or a pothole.

“It’s all of a sudden: ‘Kaboom, boom, boom,’ ” he said. “It’s too close for comfort.”

According to federal noise experts, the severity of freeway noise can vary with the speed of traffic, the mixture of vehicles and the condition of the road.

Older, rutted and pothole-strewn highways such as the Long Beach Freeway typically generate more noise than newer, well-maintained roads.

A study last year concluded that California ranked at the bottom of all 50 states in roadway quality. That is a drop from 47th place in 2001. The study by Transportation California, a coalition of road builders, labor unions and gravel suppliers, found that 37% of state and local roads were in poor condition.

Big-rig trucks are a growing source of freeway noise. An 18-wheeler traveling at 55 mph can be as loud as 28 passenger cars traveling at the same speed, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

In 1990, trucks represented 5% of all freeway traffic in Southern California. By 2000, that number had jumped to 11%, according to the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

In Southern California, those trucks are now part of a peak commute period that has more than tripled in length. There was a time when the rush hour was exactly that -- an hour between 7 and 8 a.m. and another between 4 and 5 p.m. Today, Caltrans says, the peak traffic periods are from 6 to 9 a.m. and from 3 to 7 p.m.

Dense Sprawl

Aggravating the problem is the trend among home builders in Southern California to squeeze more houses onto tiny lots next to increasingly noisy freeways. Although sprawl is a defining characteristic of Southern California, planners say high real estate prices have made urban communities, such as downtown Los Angeles, among the most densely populated in the nation.

“We are now building on any scrap of land we can find,” said William Fulton, a land-use planner and author of books about growth in California. “We have backyards facing freeway onramps. That doesn’t happen in other parts of the country.”

To reduce the effects of freeway noise, Blomberg and other anti-noise activists suggest that planning agencies limit residential development near freeways. They also call for federal requirements to make new trucks quieter. Some communities have prohibited truck drivers from using engine compression to brake, a technique that reduces brake wear but can create more noise.

In Phoenix, state workers recently began paving 115 miles of freeway with “rubberized asphalt,” a blend of pulverized rubber and asphalt that has been shown in tests to reduce traffic noise by four to nine decibels. The Federal Highway Administration has yet to recognize rubberized asphalt as a noise-reducing alternative.

Jay Winderman, an electrical engineer who lives in Claremont with his wife and two daughters, just two blocks from the new section of the Foothill Freeway, said he would like the state to try rubberized asphalt -- anything to reduce the daily freeway racket that he compares with the sound of a sandblasting machine. He has already installed double-pane windows and even crafted a Styrofoam cover for his back bedroom window.

“The day the freeway opened to traffic,” he said, “was such a jolt that my wife literally cried.”

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Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.