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Asia Noise News

India: Rajarampuri, Shahupuri noisiest roads in Kolhapur

India: Rajarampuri, Shahupuri noisiest roads in Kolhapur

Rajarampuri, Shahupuri noisiest roads in Kolhapur – The Times of India

Rajarampuri, Shahupuri noisiest roads in Kolhapur

Rajarampuri, Shahupuri noisiest roads in Kolhapur – The Times of India

KOLHAPUR: The city’s commercial areas Rajarampuri, Shahupuri and the Mahadwar road were the noisiest on Thursday as Ganesh Chaturthi was celebrated with sound levels exceeding 100 decibels.

Students from the department of environmental sciences of the Shivaji University, Kolhapur, monitored the sound levels in the city as the first day of the festival was celebrated.

Readings indicated that sound from almost areas crossed the permissible sound limits laid down by the Maharashtra pollution control board (MPCB). Sound levels should not exceed 55 decibels in residential areas.

Noise levels in areas of the city like Udyam nagar, Rajarampuri, Shahupuri, Laxmipuri and Mahadwar road, showed consistent readings of 90 decibels and above, even at night.

P D Raut, the head of the department of environmental sciences, told TOI, “The digital sound systems are mainly responsible for these readings. Data shows that sound levels were almost double the permissible limits. Rajarampuri area was the noisiest recording 107 dB, while Shahpuri followed with a reading if 106 dB.”

Two students actively participated in monitoring the sound levels using a noise level meter. Raut said that four ten-minute readings were taken over 60 minutes in a particular area and calculated accordingly.

Thursday’s readings show that very few Ganesh mandals have responded to the Kolhapur police’s appeal for not using high decibel sound system. Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com  

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Asia Noise News

A right earful: Hong Kong’s noise pollution

A right earful: Hong Kong’s noise pollutionHong Kong

Time Out Hong Kong | Big Smog | A right earful: Hong Kong’s noise pollution

As the government updates its citywide noise pollution map for the first time in 15 years, Rhoda Kwan and Anna Cummins explore the consequences of cacophony. Additional reporting by Dorothy Hou
Car horns, bus engines, unloading lorries, whirring drills – these are just some of the everyday sounds of our city. Excess noise is a blight on the lives of at least a million Hongkongers, but it’s one that we often put up with. The government recognises that one in seven of us are regularly exposed to noise levels above WHO (World Health Organisation)-recommended limits. And the impact of excess noise goes much further than making it difficult to catch the quiet part of your favourite show on Netflix. Research shows that exposure to road noise of an average 30 decibels (dB) at night, equivalent to a faint hum, can induce sleep disturbance. Noises over 35 dB have been shown to disrupt concentration at work or school. While it’s well known that long term exposure to loud noise can damage hearing, there are also behavioural effects that it can induce, such as irritability, increased aggression, stress and even depression.The Environmental Protection Department (EPD) is currently in the process of updating a 15-year-old map that records levels of traffic noise pollution over the city. When the map was last published in 2000, it showed that 37 percent of people living in Yau Tsim Mong were regularly exposed to noise levels of 70 dB or more. (That’s equivalent to the noise of a vacuum cleaner, or standing a few metres away from a car doing 100km/h). Around 25 percent of people living in Sham Shui Po, Wan Chai, Kowloon City and Tsuen Wan also dealt regularly with excess clamour at the turn of the millennium, with the majority of other districts recording noise disturbance from traffic in at least 15 percent of residents. 

So, why is the map only being updated now? In essence, it takes so long because it’s a such a big and expensive job. “The reassessment is about spatial distribution of traffic noise,” explains an EPD spokesperson. “Results of the work will provide information on the road traffic noise environment across the territory. This will help identify problem areas… [and] help to refine the strategies where necessary. An enormous amount of data has to be collected for the reassessment process. The calculation model includes about 130,000 building structures, 2,100km of busy roads, geographic information including hills, terrain, podiums, barriers, road surface types and enclosures, and traffic data such as traffic flow, composition and speed. [It’s] undoubtedly a very time-consuming and labour intensive task.”

Time Out Hong Kong | Big Smog | A right earful: Hong Kong’s noise pollution

The EPD is clearly conscious of the number of people affected by excess noise. “The Government of Hong Kong does care about noise that will affect people,” their spokesperson asserts to us. The department currently operates a ‘four pronged’ approach to combating noise pollution, which includes legislation and mitigation by planning. 

It’s slightly easier to mitigate the problem with new roads, which can be built with soundproofing barriers and quieter surfaces. But there are currently around 600 old roads that regularly produce noise over 70 dB. And that’s something that, for now, a lot of people are going to have to put up with. While the department has pointed out that preliminary results of its survey indicate a drop in the number of people exposed to excess traffic noise, compared to the last survey in 2000, there were still 3,859 official noise complaints from the public last year.

“The EPD benchmark is 70 dB, this is an international standard” explains Michelle Wong, communications manager at think tank Civic Exchange. “The problem here is that we do not have any comprehensive study of the baseline of the city’s noise distribution. If we apply 70 dB to different situations, the outcome could be very different. In a commercial centre 70 dB has one outcome. But in a residential area, it is another story.”

Civic Exchange are one group who have regularly called on the government to pay more attention to the perennial issue of noise pollution, which can often be superseded in the public’s consciousness by other, more physically evident forms of pollution. “In noise control, much more effort is needed from the government, business and the public of Hong Kong,” says Wong. “[The government] have mentioned planning as one of the major directions they will take to combat noise pollution. But everybody knows that Hong Kong is a very tiny place with limited land and a huge demand on housing. Planners simply want to take advantage and use every piece of land. But is it always suitable to build a residential area in a certain
location? The alignment of the building also plays a really important role in diminishing the noise impact. For example, the bedroom windows should not be facing a main road directly.”

We visit Mong Kok to find out what residents think of the EPD’s new survey and the preliminary results. Ms Cheung works in a grocery shop and lives on Shanghai Street. “I live on the 21st floor and the noise is still pretty bad,” she tells us. “The lorries for the fruit market start unloading at about 5am. It wakes me up from my sleep. They have another round at 10pm.” Student Lily Ng grew up in the area, and finds the noise from the main road she lives on distracting. “Sometimes I can’t concentrate on my work because of the buses outside the window,” she confesses. “Perhaps it’s just an excuse, but it makes me want to give up on studying my homework! I can’t say it’s got worse since 2000, but it’s definitely no better. I think it is just the same now as it always was. Bad! You kind of get used to it, though.”

The EPD may have spent around $100million per year combating noise pollution, but Civic Exchange are hoping more will be done. “Like many other issues in Hong Kong, there is no proactivity from the government,” explains Wong. “The ideal case would be for the government officials to proactively check construction sites, or the traffic roads and make sure the noise level meets the benchmark, rather than people feeling annoyed and filing a complaint. You can imagine there are more people who are disturbed by noise pollution who are passive and don’t file complaints. They might just think ‘This is Hong Kong, it’s a noisy place’ and endure.

Source: http://www.timeout.com.hk

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Asia Noise News

Indonesia in new bid to muffle noisy mosques

Indonesia in new bid to muffle noisy mosques

JAKARTA – Indonesia has set up a new team to reduce noise from mosques, an official said Thursday, as places of worship go into overdrive during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

There are approximately 800,000 mosques in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation but residents living nearby have long complained that their speakers are too loud.

Places of worship become particularly active during Ramadan, which this year runs from mid-June to mid-July, when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset and mosques blare out religious sermons even earlier than usual.

In a new attempt to tackle the issue, Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who is also head of a body grouping many of the country’s mosques, has formed a team to take samples of noise from mosque speakers across the country, his spokesman Husain Abdullah told AFP.

“The idea is for mosques to turn down the volume a little so that the sound can be heard only by residents in the immediate area,” he said, adding that the aim was to have a “more harmonious, melodious sound coming from mosques”.

He said that mosques also had to ensure that the sounds they produced did not overlap with noises from others nearby, saying there was often a “war of the loudspeakers” between places of worship in the same area which try to outdo each other by playing sermons loudly.

The new group, set up earlier this month, had collected many samples and would send a report to the vice president, who planned to sit down with Indonesia’s top Muslim clerical body and Islamic organisations and discuss how to tackle the issue.

The new group would complement a previous initiative, which saw around 100 teams of technicians deployed across the country to help fine-tune mosque loudspeakers and give advice on how best to arrange speakers to reduce noise.

But Abdullah admitted regulating noisy mosques across the world’s biggest archipelago nation would be tough and called on the clerical body, the Indonesian Council of Ulema, to issue a fatwa on the issue.

Source:

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Asia Noise News

Exposure to Hong Kong’s traffic noise declines over 15 years, even as city grows

Fewer people are now exposed to excessive levels of traffic noise than were a decade and a half ago, but the problem remains an issue in old urban districts, environmental officials say.

The Environmental Protection Department says it is in the process of updating a 15-year-old traffic noise pollution map for the city.

The latest data available on the departments website is from 2000, and shows at least 1.14 million people were exposed to traffic noise exceeding 70 decibels, which is the planning standard.

The [department] is in the course of reassessing the spatial distribution of traffic noise over the whole territory based on more recent traffic census data and the reassessment work is expected to be completed later this year, a spokesman said.

The department said preliminary results indicated the total number of people affected by traffic noise at levels higher than planning standards had been reduced, but old urban districts such as Kwun Tong and Yau Tsim Mong still remain the worst in terms of the number of people affected.

It added that prevention of noise problems through active planning processes and implementation of traffic noise abatement programmes, including the provision of noise barriers and low-noise road surfacing across the city, had helped lower the number.

In 2000, at least 37 per cent of people in Yau Tsim Mong were exposed to traffic noise higher than 70 decibels, as were more than a quarter of residents in Kowloon City, Sham Shui Po and Tsuen Wan.

The noise map on the current website factors in the year 2000s population of 6.6 million a figure that has since grown by nearly 10 per cent. Traffic flow is also likely to have changed significantly in that time.

Chinese University noise assessment expert Professor Lam Kin-che said noise mapping was an extremely expensive and difficult project to conduct, but was a credible way to trace noise pollution to its source. He said it was normal that such a study took a long time to update.

Lawmaker Cyd Ho Sau-lan, who chaired the Legislative Councils now defunct subcommittee on issues relating to air, noise and light pollution, welcomed the move.

The subcommittee had asked them to update this noise map before, she said, but added that more needed to be done as noise and light pollution were getting worse in certain areas, especially mixed commercial and residential districts.

Buildings are getting taller and there are fewer natural noise barriers. Noise pollution can seriously affect the quality of sleep and thus the health of residents.

A British study last month cited a link between traffic noise pollution and an increased risk of strokes and deaths, especially among the elderly. Experts in Hong Kong have called for health risks from noise pollution to be factored into environmental impact assessment reports.

But the department said a 2012 study it commissioned on 10,000 homes found no conclusive evidence that physiological responses due to noise exposure were associated with a long-term risk of cardiovascular disease.

Noise complaints have been dropping over the years. From 4,952 in 2010, they gradually declined to 3,859 last year. Complaints specifically about traffic noise have also dropped from 215 in 2010 to 88 last year.   This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Fewer exposed to traffic noise as city grows

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Asia Noise News

Microsoft Azure is helping create a noise tracking app in China

Microsoft Azure is helping create a noise tracking app in China
WRITTEN BY KAREEM ANDERSON  JUN 23RD, 2015

Image Credit: Microsoft Research
For those of us who dwell in urban populated areas, the occurrence of noise congestion can sometimes become a mere backdrop in our living conditions, like a soundtrack to a movie. The longer we live in an area, the more adept we become at dealing with the noise. However, studies are showing that noise pollution ranks among the most pervasive forms of harm against a persons well being. An overexposure to the drudgery of noise pollution can manifest itself in the harmful deterioration of mental and physical well-being of residents, according to an article in the Environmental Health Perspectives (ehp).

Thanks in part to a rising socioeconomic bubble in China, an article in The Economist predicted back in 2014, that 70 percent of China’s population will be living in cities by 2030. That prediction assumes that roughly 1 billion people will be moving into highly condensed areas, and this shift will contribute to a few serious problems. Among the potential problems that may arise, an increase in noise pollution is one that a few researchers are aiming to track. As the rise in factories, construction projects, and vehicles continue in China the audible assault on residents could be detrimental.

Image Credit: Microsoft Research

Investigators in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, with funding from Microsoft Research Asia, would like to implement better tools for tracking noise pollution in real-time. Professor Yanmin Zhu is leading a team in the development of a project called NoiseSense. NoiseSense is a service designed to map urban noise by using crowdsourced noise measurements from smartphone users, according to Microsoft Research. At first glance, the sound capturing app and subsequent usage almost resembles a Waze-like implementation of research. According to Microsoft Research, “They envision a noise-mapping service that will allow anyone to query the noise level in any urban area in the world. More importantly, NoiseSense could give authorities the information needed to devise and implement effective noise abatement strategies.”

Image Credit: Microsoft Research
While the app and research methods are forward thinking and inventive, Professor Zhu realizes that is only half the equation in addressing the problem. Once users are capturing and measuring noise levels, Zhu, and his team will need supercomputer systems on standby ready to hash the mountains of input data. Enter Microsoft’s Azure platform. Zhu spent six months at Microsoft Research Asia as the recipient of a Young Faculty Program award. While at (MRA) Zhu became very familiar with Microsoft’s growing research into urban informatics. Using a grant he received from Microsoft, Zhu applied the free cloud computing power of Microsoft’s Azure platform to supplement his research into his noise sensing project. As for the status of Zhu’s noise mapping app, “They have developed a system prototype for a real-time, fine-grained noise-mapping service on Microsoft Azure, and they have created noise-measuring smartphone apps for both Windows Phone and Android operating systems,” according to Microsoft.

Image Credit: Microsoft Research
Zhu’s research is another forward thinking use of how cloud computing and big data can help create applications with far reaching real-world results. Microsoft is also aiding in the expansion of urban computing, with projects designed to improve many other aspects of city life, including urban transportation and air quality and energy consumption. These are the early days for this type implementation of research, but if Microsoft’s Azure platform can position itself accordingly, Azure could be a necessary tool for researchers moving forward.

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