The price of a quiet room

Noise is the pollutant people complain about most and regulate least. Unlike smoke it leaves no residue, and unlike dirty water it cannot be collected and tested later. It exists only while it is happening, which makes it easy to dispute and hard to prove.

The health evidence is nonetheless substantial. Long-term exposure to traffic noise is associated with raised blood pressure and disturbed sleep, and the mechanism does not require being woken. The body responds to sudden sound even during sleep, and repeated small responses across a night leave a person tired without any memory of having been disturbed. People living beside busy roads often report sleeping normally while measurements show otherwise.

Children's learning is affected too. Studies around airports have found measurable differences in reading development between schools under flight paths and comparable schools nearby, with the gap persisting after adjusting for family income.

What makes noise politically awkward is who bears it. Quiet is expensive. It is bought with distance from roads, with thick glazing, with gardens. In almost every city, the quietest housing costs the most, so noise exposure follows income closely. A problem that falls mainly on people with the least ability to move is a problem with a weak constituency.

Some cities have begun to treat quiet as infrastructure rather than luxury — low-noise road surfaces, speed limits chosen partly for sound, protected quiet areas in parks. These are cheap compared with their health effects, which is usually a sign that something has been undervalued for a long time.