I’m still on recess from anything important, so here’s my next trivial wondering: What is it with these massive highway “sound barriers” that deface our landscape?
I’m talking about beauties like this one, that cost $1,000,000 per mile to build. We taxpayers have now spent some $6,000,000,000 (that’s pronounced “six billion dollars”) on them, and I’m wondering why. Like, why are they really there? And at what cost? And for what benefit?
If you look closely at the pavement in the photo of this highway, you can see that it’s pretty rough. Guess what? THAT is the biggest culprit in the noise-pollution. For some years, we owned a little cabin in Bowdoinham, Maine, about a mile through the woods from I-95. We could hear the sizzle of truck tires through that mile of forest, because the pavement was so degraded and granular. After a few years, they repaved it with a smoother material and the noise disappeared completely. Now, that is infrastructure improvement.
So why do we spend (shudder) BILLIONS of dollars on these eyesores?
Well, one rationale might be that the people who live near the highways don’t like the noise. But I’m pretty sure that when the highways were first built, the adjacent land/home-owners were compensated for the negative effect on their property value. And any subsequent buyer would have bought the place cheap precisely because it was next to a noisy highway. So it doesn’t make any sense for the rest of us to spend our own money to improve their property value ex post facto, does it? Caveat emptor still rules.
Worse, from my point of view, is the recurring discovery that miles and miles of these eyesores are built where there are no houses anywhere in sight. Whose tender ears are we protecting, anyhow? The squirrels in the forests?
And even when there are houses, such barriers are effective in reducing sound for only about a hundred feet behind them…and so these houses are just barely benefitting. Besides, they were built and sold while obviously on a major highway, so again, let the buyer beware, okay?
Need proof? The Wisconsin DOT did some calculations:
Years of research show that the noise from engines, wind turbulence, and tires on pavement are the primary sources of highway noise. Electric propulsion and streamlining are reducing the first two, and better tire design and improved pavement can take care of the rest.
But some lobbyist somewhere is sitting up nights figuring out how to ensure that another zillion miles of these monstrosities are funded by the next appropriation of our tax money. We’d better make our voices heard in favor of more sensible use of the dough.
After all, Robert Frost certainly had it right:
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”