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Effects of Noise on People (Residential Land Uses Only) |
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Day-Night Average Sound in Decibels |
Effects1 |
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Hearing Loss |
Speech Interference |
Annoyance2 |
Average Community Reaction4 |
General Community Attitude Towards Area |
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Indoor |
Outdoor |
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Qualitative Description |
Percentage Sentence Intelligibility |
Distance in Meters for 95% Sentence Intelligibility |
Percentage of Population Highly Annoyed3 |
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75 & above |
may begin to occur |
98% |
0.5 |
37% |
very severe |
Noise is likely to be the most important of all adverse aspects of the community environment. |
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70 |
will not likely occur |
99% |
0.9 |
25% |
severe |
Noise is one of the most important adverse aspects of the community environment. |
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65 |
will not occur |
100% |
1.5 |
15% |
significant |
Noise is one of the important adverse aspects of the community environment. |
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60 |
will not occur |
100% |
2.0 |
9% |
moderate |
Noise may be considered an adverse aspect of the community environment. |
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55 & below |
will not occur |
100% |
3.5 |
4% |
slight |
Noise considered no more important than various other environment factors. |
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1
"Speech Interference" data are drawn from the following tables in the United States Environmental Protection Agency's (USEPA) "Levels Document"; Table 3, Figure D-1, Figure D-2, Figure D-3. All other data from the National Academy of Science 1977 report "Guidelines for Preparing Environmental Impact Statements on Noise, Report of Working Group 69 on Evaluation of Environmental Impact of Noise."
2 Depends on attitudes and other factors.
3 The percentages of people reporting annoyance to lesser extent are higher in each case. An unknown small percentage of people will report being "highly annoyed" even in the quietest surroundings. One reason is the difficulty all people have in integrating annoyance over a very long time.
4 Attitudes or other non-acoustic factors can modify this. Noise at low levels can still be an important problem, particularly when it intrudes into a quiet environment.
NOTE: Research implicates noise as a factor producing stress-related health effects such as heart disease, high-blood pressure and stroke, ulcers and other digestive disorders. The relationships between noise and these effects, however, have not as yet been quantified.
SOURCE: Federal Interagency Committee on Urban Noise. 1980. Guidelines for Considering Noise for Land Use Planning and Control.