A tale of two noisy sides of town

TODAY’S BLOG #572: Residents living along Veterans Memorial Parkway in east London have to fight to get fair tests done of noise levels from the highway. Along soon to be rebuilt Hyde Park Road in west London the noise barriers will be up before the road is finished.

Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2011 – London

Here’s what frustrates people about the way the City of London often deals with the public. Civic officials sometimes don’t listen very well.

There was another example presented last night at a meeting of city council’s new Civic Works Committee.

Veterans Memorial Parkway, in the farther reaches of east London, separates large industrial and commercial operations on its east side from some very nice suburban homes on the west side.

Colette Dodds owns one of those homes. She has a swimming pool, deck and barbecue in her back yard which she can hardly use, she claims, because of the constant roar from the busy four-lane highway which is just beyond the fence at the rear of her property.

“You have to come and live what we live through,” she told the committee. “You have to be there to understand. It’s too noisy to be outdoors.
Becky Sutton owns a house nearby. She has the same problem.

Both women appeared at the committee meeting to complain, again, about the noise and to request, again, that the city do another study to determine whether noise abatement barriers are required along that stretch of the highway.

Such a study has been done before. Consultants hired by the city determined the road noise was within acceptable norms, whatever they are. But that study had a flaw, at least in the minds of the two women and of their councillor in Ward 2, Bill Armstrong.

Because most people in the neighbourhood weren’t home when the study was conducted, the consultants didn’t go into backyards to test the noise levels. Instead they stood in front yards or in a nearby parking lot and estimated – that’s the key word – they estimated what they thought the backyard noise would be.

They didn’t even do the study at the busiest time of the day or year, times when large trucks are growling in and out of the industrial sites. Instead, in both cases, they relied on some formulas to calculate what the noise levels would probably be in the backyard at other times of the day, suppertime for example when people might be barbecuing in their backyard or taking a swim or having a drink with friends.

For several years that has really ticked off residents of the neighbourhood. But city officials haven’t seemed able, or willing, to understand why all the fuss about the tests. And they didn’t really want to listen to explanations from residents, either.

Partly, one guesses, this is because if it is discovered noise levels are, in fact, seriously impacting on the quality of life of the neighbourhood – as residents insist – the city would be on the hook for the $1.5 million cost of the noise barriers.

Also on last night’s committee agenda was a report on the pending rebuild of Hyde Park Road from two lanes to four. Already included in the $30 million cost are noise barriers for a number of properties along the wider road. No noise studies have been done because the road hasn’t been widened yet. But there is an assumption it will be noisier, so the barriers are part of the deal.

So to recap: In east London along a busy truck route the residents have been stonewalled on noise barriers. In west London, along a road that hasn’t even been built yet, residents have been assured noise barriers will be built for them free of charge.

In 2011, as surely most people know and certainly City Hall should, perception is reality for many people. And certainly the perception possibly held by people in the east London neighbourhood is that they have been treated less fairly than folks on the other side of town. That is their reality.

City officials seem to have trouble appreciating the optics as was obvious in the suggested solution. The consultants will come again, sometime; they will stand in the backyards and test for noise; they will extrapolate – their fancy word for estimate – their data to various times of the day.

No one had an explanation why the consultants couldn’t come round on a warm night when the trucks are howling far louder than the crickets and find out once and for all just what it feels like to live on Simpson Crescent instead of, well, perhaps Hyde Park Road.