Quiet Zone
Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit magazine
This week was the APTA Rail Conference in San Francisco. It was nice to get back to San Francisco — which is quickly becoming a favorite city for the sheer variety of transit available — and even nicer to see everyone at the show.
The seminars were standing room only for most of the ones I attended with several people telling me they tried to get into the Commuter Rail Update seminar only to find the room full and the audience spilling out into the hallway. (I was one of the lucky ones who got there early and had a seat.)
The trip provided me with the opportunity to sample a wide selection of transit options in a short period of time, including bus, streetcar, subway, light rail, cable car and airplane. I know that last one seems the odd man out in this group, but they all have something in common — noise.
No I don’t mean the noise from them passing by; I mean the noise inside the vehicles. I will give the cable cars a pardon as largely you are open to the elements as far as noise is concerned. But for the others, I was struck by how loud they were as they traveled their routes.
Let me say first, that I’m not an iPod person, so I didn’t have that as a distraction. I first noticed the noise on the plane ride out to San Francisco. I thought maybe I was seated near the engines, but I realized the noise was from the air vents blowing oxygen into the cabin. The buses I rode had the same problem — too much vent noise. The streetcars and other rail vehicles had a different element — too much external noise (be it from traveling through tunnels or what have you) being amplified within the car.
Now I’m not pointing fingers at any of the agencies I was visiting. I’ve had this problem all across the country, it just hit home for me this week as I traveled on a variety of modes in so short a period of time.
And then as I was discussing noise concerns by residents when transit is added to a neighborhood with someone at the show, it hit me — we may be spending too much time focusing on making transit quieter on the outside and not on the inside.
There are numerous car commercials (in fact one was on during the last Super Bowl) proclaiming the benefits of how quiet a certain brand of vehicle is when you’re inside. When was the last time we could say the same thing about transit? When was the last time we said, “And on our vehicles your ride to work will be quiet enough you can have a conversation without shouting to the guy sitting next to you!”
We spend a massive amount of time making transit vehicles quieter so as not to disturb neighborhoods — and really, what are we doing, sneaking through these neighborhoods? How much noisier is a bus than a Harley? — maybe we should look at making our vehicles quieter as not to disturb the riders or better yet, the operators.
Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,
June 8th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
I live in San Francisco and I am in Holland right now, I travel here periodically for work and every time I come here I fly into Amsterdam and take the train to Eindhoven (a 1.5 hour ride). Every time I ride the transit systems here, especially the commuter rail and high speed rail systems, I am overwhelmed with how whisper quiet riding the rails here are. The train station at the Amsterdam airport is underground beneath the airport and while I am waiting for my train other trains come in and out of the station and they ride so quietly if you are not looking at them you may not notice a train came into the station. When you are riding in the train you cannot hear anything except for a quiet hum as you roll on the rails. You have to whisper if you’re talking to someone right next to you so that you do not disturb the other people in the train. I ride BART and MUNI light rail often also I have ridden transit systems all over the country(I am a transit addict), and my question is what are they doing in Europe that we are not doing in America? It cannot be a secret right? How do they maintain their infrastructure differently then us?
June 12th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I’m a Chicagoan who is also a transit addict. I last visited San Francisco in 2006. I find BART and other “new school” American heavy rail systems (MARTA,DC Metro, Baltimore Metro for example) much quieter than Chicago’s CTA rapid transit. I’ve yet to get to Europe but I imagine transit is more highly valued “across the pond” and the public is more will to pay for a high quality system [via their taxes].