Dear Mayor and Members of the City Council,
Thank you for your ongoing efforts towards establishing Menlo Park as a rail Quiet Zone, and for your intentions to fund the completion of the QZ Implementation Study in your budget deliberations this Tuesday evening. I encourage you to move ahead swiftly on the project.
I also wanted to bring to your attention this new article published Friday (June 9) in the New York Times that presents sobering new data on the health impact of noise pollution. It’s an in-depth article but three points in particular stand out for attention:
1. A growing body of research shows that spikes of chronic noise, which rattle a neighborhood hundreds of times a day and hundreds of thousands of times each year, is not just annoying, but it is is a “largely unrecognized health threat that is increasing the risk of hypertension, stroke, and heart attacks worldwide, including for more than 100 million Americans.” These spikes of loud noise appear to be even more deleterious to health than ongoing, constant sound of the same average decibels - though that is also a terrible problem.
2. Research scientists found that volunteers subjected to nighttime recordings of sporadic spikes of sound at very high decibels - such as passing trains and low overhead airplanes - had the next morning higher adrenaline levels, stiffened arteries, and spikes in plasma proteins indicating systemic inflammation.
3. Also, counter to conventional wisdom, "many people believe they adapt to the cacophony of living near noise, but data shows the opposite: prior noise exposure actually primes the body to overreact, amplifying the negative effects.”
The great news in Menlo Park is that we can make our busiest crossings safer to pedestrians, cyclists, and cars, while also eliminating the scourge of train noise for residents, visitors, and businesses. We can show the way forward for cities trying to find ways to tackle noise pollution to improve healthy and quality of life.
The link to this new article is here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/09/health/noise-exposure-health-impacts.html
Thank you,
Elliot Krane, MD
Lennox Ave., Menlo Park
Elliot Krane | ekrane05@gmail.com | 650.619.6472
