▲ 78 points
back
57 comments
According to this page the noisiest city in Europe would be Vienna. I have some doubts about this. I have no idea how they measured this but I would expect there to be some bias in the data.
Noise levels are very hard to measure as they are very different depending on where in the city you live. It also is even harder to measure in practice because the building standard can greatly affect how loud it is inside.
For Vienna you can find noise measurements online and really outside of very busy roads the city is pretty quiet: https://maps.laerminfo.at/
Haha, fellow Vienna resident here and I live on the Wienzeile in the 5th. It is one of the quietest cities on the planet considering the population density. The 5th has the same population density and area as Hell’s Kitchen, New York and yet half the time you wonder where the heck everyone is hiding, it’s so quiet here.
If you look at their metrics and sources for the noise data, the methodology is clearly faulty and subjective. The only way to get accurate noise data is to place an array of field recorders to sample sound from each location. Most of the studies listed and their use of subjective sentiment from reviews of those places do not use any form of noise measurement.
The methodology for "quiet" places seems particularly off. One of the ones in Chicago is right next to a highway that sees constant 50-70mph traffic.
I find it odd that Lyon is on the top ten(ish) - but not Paris?
And was hoping to see Japan here - there are some fantastic parks/temple/shrines in the big cities there.
I just looked up my city, and then zoomed into one of their locations indicated as "quiet". I can attest that the one I looked at is not "quiet" from city noise as much as quiet from other people. It's located downtown, and is a park showcasing historic lifestyle of when the city was founded. You can easily hear the very nearby highway, but it is people quiet as it's pretty much only ever visited by kids taking a school field trip. I've been on a film shoot using the site as a location, and it is definitely not film set quiet.
This is an enlightening article. I’ve had tinnitus and hyperacusis for my entire adult life. I used to be able to live in a reasonably quiet high rise. In fact I started programming remotely full time from home in an urban high rise condominium.
After many life disasters in part related to urban living with these conditions, I have found myself long term homeless and destitute. I tried moving back into a city a few years ago, in a “luxury” building that had poor construction standards, particularly in terms of the sound isolation from neighbors and outside.
If I could go back, I’d place sound isolation at the top of the list of requirements, given my disability. Might have helped to restart software development. Bummer.
Great article.
The quietest place in NYC is in lower Manhattan? Find that hard to believe. At a minimum, if we’re just talking Manhattan there’s a rather large and, um, centrally-located park that has to have least one or two quiet corners.
Is this article real? I have not been in every country and city in the world but... how Berlin is not at the top? They have several types of transportation simultaneously going and walking through the Tiergarten district (not the park itself!) while is incredible quiet. Even passing to touristic places makes you wonder if that spot is really a touristic place.
There's a small park in Cleveland, OH (Wade Oval?) that convinced me of the value of elevation in creating urban quiet.
From memory, it's a bowl approximately 3m or so below street level at the lowest.
Yet despite the modest depth, it was impressively quiet inside.
I'm the opposite. I live on a crest of a bowl, and it's if I can hear everything, people talking in their yards many houses away.
Bristle your house/apartment with directional microphones and signs saying "Notice: Your public conversation is being streamed to the Internet"
Maybe people will change their habits!
It’s striking that “in the world” seems to exclude almost all the land mass and humans of the world, and all the most populated cities in the world. I’m sure Bangkok is louder than all these cities, and I’d be curious about the pools of silence that might exist there. Those are harder won than a quiet park is a relatively quiet (compared to say Lagos) city in a quiet European country.
Something's wrong with this. It seems it's a garbage in, garbage out rating. I.e. Edinburgh is at the top in the UK. I clicked there and it has a few measurements at 5 random places.
I used to live in the back-facing first floor apartment off Atlantic Ave (basically the busiest street?) in Brooklyn and I almost never heard anything going on outside. It was always weird stepping outside to the very lively street.
It was very strangely quiet and I didn't particularly like it.
Was hoping for actual sound readings in places like Central Park.
I've lived in the Boston area for a long time, and I'm surprised that it's cited as the noisiest US city. I have no formal reason why; it just doesn't seem like an unusually noisy city.
On a related topic, it's very hard to quantify noise exposure. We live on a hill in a northern suburb, and one of the biggest sources of our noise is the north-south highway 2.5 miles to the west. If the wind is from the west, I can aurally track trucks going up and down the highway. If not, it may be inaudible.
<sigh> if people think these cities are noisy, try Asia’s. You’ll live in hell and be amazed at how peaceful and quiet your home city could be!
I raise you the cities in the biggest country in South Asia; they'll make your hell seem like paradise.
"around the world".
> USA and half Europe only.
I'm in Boston, it's not loud. I took a quick skim through their methodology and each tactic seems sensible, but taken together they miss the mark.
I don't doubt that they're measuring something real. Maybe it's frequency of siren's (be they hospital or police cars), but to jump to "world's loudest cities" is a claim that the research doesn't hold up. All along the emerald necklace[0] are quiet spots. The city is old so tons of streets have relatively slow traffic.
Makes me doubt everything else.
Completely agree. Boston proper is an absolute ghost town outside of office hours, and is basically silent even then while everyone is working. That plus Vienna at the top makes me throw this whole thing as useless.
Only parts of the financial district are that way. In my experience the rest of the neighborhoods in Boston proper are annoyingly loud compared to other cities I've lived in (except NY, of course).
I had an office on Newbury street that was an absolute nightmare to work in from about 6pm every night due to shoppers and restaurant patrons, and an office in DTX where I always wished the windows were way thicker due to the constant noise from crowds, buskers, etc. A few blocks away from that office, in Chinatown, I basically lived in an office where it was just constant noise from all the chinatown gate crowd even at 1 in the morning.
And most of the last 20 years I've spent living in Mission Hill, Back Bay, Fort Point, South End, South Boston. All of them were lot louder than, say, Midtown Atlanta. South Boston in particular has both constant airport noise and a weird obsession with rooftop parties and fireworks, much to the detriment of my young kids' sleep.
This was quite disappointing. It would be interesting to see what are actually the loudest cities (via measuring sound at various spots), but this doesn't do that. It doesn't even tell you if European or American cities are louder.
I think it does. The loudest American city, Boston, has just 12% of the population exposed to noise levels >65 dB, while Europe's top ten is in the range from 29% to 59%.
You can of course disagree that this is the right metric to measure.
From a cursory search of where I live this just seems to list parks. There are three parks listed where I live that are far and away louder than my road because they're surrounded on all sides by busy major roads.
Hah, it lists the japanese garden in Bonn as one of the most silent places with a score of 1.30. It is right next to the Autobahn which also features a loud tram.
Please someone do this for New Orleans.
e: ok most of those spots are fine but whoever thinks the Riverfront Park is as quiet as the Fly is nuts
In NYC, if you’re around 3rd Ave and E 51st, check out Greenacre Park.
One of the Rockefellers built this waterfall and park in middle of the city, and litigated for years to prevent the neighbors from building higher.
It’s a beautiful, peaceful oasis in the middle of the city.
I don’t think this is exactly what it means, but I recommend if you want some quiet in a busy city, go into a library or a book store. Typically they are quiet and calm places, offering a break from the sensory overload that is a city.
Japanese gardens feature extremely strongly. Is this due to where they tend to be built, something about their design, or some selection effect (ie bias in the data), or something else?
Noticed that distinct bias towards gardens and parks too, and after looking at my city, very quickly came to the conclusion that this was certifiably full of shit, i.e.
- a park with heavy foot/vehicle traffic that's half a mile from the intersection of two major interstates;
- an arboretum that's immediately adjacent to a major interstate beltway exit; and
- a beach surrounded by commercial development locally known for its active nightlife scene.
Perhaps just as ironic is a state park in an area known for its retired affluence---where the only major road is a 2-laner that's sparsely traveled---with a higher "quiet score" than 2 of these locations.
Denvers quiet place is just a park in the middle of downtown, would be much quieter to just drive/walk a mile away from the buildings.
During the pandemic, my wife and I spent a lot of time on Facetime with her sister in Los Angeles. I remember how loud it was for her, people yelling, fire crackers, music, vehicles, a near constant noise cloud outside. It differed so remarkably with our home, which was very quiet, that I took note.
How do you say "world" and leave out 77% of the World's population and cities.
Seems like in many cities, a Japanese garden is the best bet for a quiet spot!
Looking at a city I know (Chicago) calling these the “quietest” places is just silly. Sure, these may be somewhat quiet places (on occasion), and are relatively quiet for their proximity to downtown, but they are nowhere close to the quietest, as in, places that are the most quiet. Just another example of misuse of superlatives.
> Next, we identified which parks and nature spots are considered quiet by those who visit them. We did this by searching visitors’ reviews for mentions of ‘quiet’, ‘relaxing’, ‘tranquil’, ‘calm’, and ‘peaceful’. This gave us a ‘Quiet Score’, a metric we created based on three factors: the share of each location’s reviews that mention these words; the location’s average visitor rating; and its popularity, and whether that impacts its peacefulness (a place with many reviews may be more crowded and less peaceful, while one with only a few reviews may not accurately represent the typical visitor experience). The higher the ‘Quiet Score’, the more peaceful the place is. In total, we looked into over 3,000 parks and nature spots across 245 cities.
Ok so they did sentiment analysis of reviews of parks in cities. Maybe “popular quiet places” wasn’t as catchy of a title.
I don't buy this. No way Cagliari is way louder than San Francisco.
This is beyond any reasonable form of acceptable extrapolation from tiny non-random sample data. Even the most cursory glance at the 'study' should throw up major red flags (Vienna, loudest city in Europe? Seriously?)
As a longtime tinitus suffrrer I'm very sympatetic to the cause, but this sort of abysmal publication does real harm to the credibility of the very real concern that is noise pollution.
Friendly reminder that cities aren't loud, cars are loud. Any measure of city loudness is just "which cities have the most traffic".
I vehemently disagree. The major source of noise in my area is people. Not saying my experience extends to every city, but even blaming traffic is a naive generalization.
Where I am, most of the noise comes from air conditioning and physical plant equipment from neighbouring buildings. Cars aren't that big of an issue.
Buses can be loud, but they're transient.
Yes, and specifically cars intentionally made to be loud. One obnoxious car with a loud muffler can disturb people in their homes many blocks away!
I was really curious about their methodology, since this seems like a very non-trivial dataset to acquire.
But TLDR they just scraped a bunch of reviews for mentions of the words ‘quiet’, ‘relaxing’, ‘tranquil’, ‘calm’, and ‘peaceful’. It's not the same as actually sampling sound levels throughout a city. Probably many of the quietest places won't have map listings and reviews at all.
That explains why a garden near me shows as 'quiet' - it's a lovely garden, but it's next to two busy roads, so it's definitely not quiet.
Yeah it would have been nice to see some sort of actual analytic and quantitively measured heat maps that were maybe crowd sourced from the relatively large communities of people interested in noise pollution world wide. But the layout is pretty.
> a very non-trivial dataset to acquire
Any crowdsourcing theories about how many samples would be needed to accomplish this mission? Presume phones have sufficient sensors to acquire samples.