Landscape architecture for noise contrrol.

[aaabha]

The previously quiet (relatively) street that runs through our neighborhood has been deemed a major thoroughfare by Harris County, TX -- and once quiet yards that abutt the street are now inundated with noise from trucks, overzealous teens sans mufflers, and just the typical noise of urban America at higher and higher levels of density. What are our options for minimizing the noise level? Will landscaping suppress the noise?

Judith McGlaughlin
Barkers Ridge
Homeowners Association
Houston, TX

.

[DetroitPlanner]

Are you in India or Houston??? Google Living Wall.

[ColoGI]

The previously quiet (relatively) street that runs through our neighborhood has been deemed a major thoroughfare by Harris County, TX -- and once quiet yards that abutt the street are now inundated with noise from trucks, overzealous teens sans mufflers, and just the typical noise of urban America at higher and higher levels of density. What are our options for minimizing the noise level? Will landscaping suppress the noise?

Judith McGlaughlin
Barkers Ridge
Homeowners Association
Houston, TX

.

Depends.

Sound scattering by vegetation is complicated and depends upon a number of factors, including biomass distribution, plant spacing, plant height, leaf size and shape, and the acoustic impedance of the plant material. General findings conclude that vegetative barriers create a perceived attenuation of road noise of 3 to 5 dBA. The conclusions are that visualization of the noise source directly affected the perceived sound levels such that when portions of a test vegetative barrier were removed, listeners perceived the levels increased disproportionately.

Best practices are you need a landscape buffer of several dozen feet consisting of broadleaf evergreen plants to attenuate ~2-5 db of noise, Federal Highway Administration recommends vegetative barriers as both a physical and psychological component of noise attenuation strategies and states that a 200-foot width of vegetation can cut the loudness of traffic noise in half (10 dBA).

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Ishii, Mitsugi, "Measurement of Road Traffic Noise Reduced by the Employment of Low Physical Barriers and Potted Vegetation," Proceedings of Inter-noise 94, Yokohama, Japan, August 1994. [both quoted in Hankard Environmental Consultants 2000. North End neighborhood noise study for the Colorado Department of Transportation Region 2 - January 2000 on-line reference at http://www.i25environment.com/noise/ncover.htm .

United States Department of Transportation - Federal Highway Administration 2002. Highway traffic noise. On-line reference at http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/htnoise.htm.

[Dan]

The OP is a spammer from India. Please understand that if you post a response, the OP will probably not be reading them.