I arrived back at my farm in Rappahannock County, Virginia, recently after a few days away, and it sounded as though an airport had been built during my absence.
BRRRRRROWWWMP!!!
BLAAAAAMP!! BLAAAAAAMP!!
BRONK! BRONK! BRONK! BRONK!
BRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMP!!!!
It turned out the Virginia Department of Transportation, in its wisdom, had installed a new rumble strip down the middle of my road, which is a state “scenic byway” — or at least was one until this noise pollutant crashed the scene.
There had been an old, worn rumble strip in the road for years and I seldom noticed the noise. But this new one is a monster: deeper and much louder. Because the road is narrow with no shoulder, and because there’s a big curve in front of my place, vehicles hit the rumble strip constantly — each time shattering the tranquility with what sounds like an 18-wheeler suffering from a bad case of flatulence.
I’m listening for the call of the blue grosbeak. BLAAMP! BLAAMP!
I’m standing in the meadow, hearing the breeze blowing through the black-eyed Susans and wild bergamot. BRRRROMPP! BRRRROMPP!
I’m soaking in the sound of water tumbling over rocks in the river. GRRONK! GRRONK! WAAAAAAAAAAMP!
Sitting on the porch late last Friday afternoon, I counted 36 hits of the rumble strip in 30 minutes, an average of one every 50 seconds. I then lay down until my migraine subsided.
Thanks to VDOT, I’m sleeping with the windows closed, and spending more of my time in the city — where I can find some peace and quiet.
***
I’ve written a lot about the restorative powers of nature, but I hadn’t realized how much the natural soundscape contributes to well-being until it suddenly disappeared. Research has shown that noise pollution — road noise, industrial din and the like — harms our cardiovascular health, raising the likelihood of heart attacks and stroke. By contrast, a study published last year found that forest acoustics (bird song, running water, wind and rainfall) significantly improve mood and cognition.
Lead study author Daniel Longman, an evolutionary biologist with Britain’s Loughborough University, told me his team is working on isolating each of the senses to determine which one contributes most to well-being. He expects to find that sound is “highly significant, perhaps second only to visual.”
In the millions of years our ancestors spent on the savanna, our ears helped us find prey and kept us away from predators. We instinctively feel comfortable with natural sounds. Within minutes of being immersed in nature’s soundscape, our heart rate and blood pressure and the stress hormone cortisol all drop.
The opposite happens when anthropogenic noise interferes. “This rumble strip — this stark, loud artificial noise — is not something that your ancestors adapted to,” Longman explained. “It’s this novel environmental insult that your body perceives as danger.”
In other words, each rumble tells my body: Saber-toothed tiger! My heart rate and blood pressure spike. “Then, I imagine, if it was me,” Longman added, “I would just feel pissed off.”
Of course, in the city, I hear ambulances, helicopters and buses all the time. But while chronic exposure to this kind of noise is unhealthy, I don’t notice it the way I register the sudden intrusion of noise pollution in the country. That’s because there’s so little background noise out here.
The baseline sound on my farm — birdsong, breeze rustling leaves — is about 27 decibels (roughly half the decibel level in the city). When a passenger car passes, that goes up to 60 decibels on the side of the road (which, because of the logarithmic nature of decibels, sounds eight times louder). When that car hits the rumble strip at 60 mph, the noise level shoots up to 86 decibels — which sounds 30 to 40 times louder to our ears than the baseline. Truck rumbles approach jackhammer levels.
This is why “people who live near rumble strips kind of despise them,” David Hurwitz, a professor of transportation engineering at Oregon State University, told me. And because city and suburban streets rarely have rumble strips, the irritation is particularly acute in the country.
If the noise pollution is annoying to humans, it’s worse for animals. Transportation noise has been shown to interfere with their ability to communicate, mate, navigate, hunt and detect predators. This degrades the larger ecosystem and stresses critters that are already hurtling toward extinction because of habitat loss.
And rumble strips are but one part of the cacophony that is increasingly plaguing rural residents — both human and beast. Two-thirds of planned data centers will be in rural areas, a Pew Research Center analysis found, up from the 13 percent currently in rural areas. The noise from each of these behemoths travels miles — and potentially much farther — and Virginia has 287 in the works, more than any other state. That’s a massive headache for the countryside.
***
Usually, the tradeoff for rumble strip noise is safety. They do save lives. But in this case, Rappahannock County officials have been fighting the rumble strip for years because, they argue, the strip makes this road less safe given its unusual narrowness.
The county board of supervisors and the county administrator pleaded with VDOT to remove the rumble strip because fire trucks have to drive down the middle of the road to avoid it — risking a head-on collision for first responders. The department rejected the plea.
Having emergency vehicles “driving down the middle of the road … was not considered to be a safety hazard,” the agency said in a written statement to me, because the law “requires drivers to pull over.”
I told Keir Whitson, vice chair of the Rappahannock County Board of Supervisors, about VDOT’s explanation.
“Oh my God!” he said with a laugh. “Pull over? There’s nowhere to go!”
True. Even if a driver is lucky enough to see the oncoming fire truck around the bend, pulling over on the shoulderless road could well mean flipping your vehicle or crashing into a ditch.
Whitson said the episode is typical of the way this little county, with only 7,400 residents, gets treated by the state. “We just have no local control over some of these significant public safety issues,” he told me. Officials here, as in other rural counties, have similar complaints about how the state shortchanges the county on education funds and frequently denies it control over zoning, agritourism, power lines and other things that threaten its rural character.
VDOT, in rejecting the county’s appeal, furnished a “crash analysis” purporting to show an improvement since the strips were installed. It found almost no change in total crashes (49 before, 50 after) but a slight improvement in injury-causing crashes (from 12 to 10) and fatalities (from one to zero). The country administrator tried to argue the case further, but he got nowhere.
In short, it didn’t sound good for the future soundscape in Rappahannock.
During a few sleepless nights, I wondered whether I would ever again hear the tree frogs on summer evenings above the BRONKs. Would I be able to make out the hoot of the great horned owl in winter despite the BLAMPs? Would I discern the call of the wood thrush next spring between the GRONKs and the WAMPs?
Peter James, who runs the UC Davis Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, was not encouraging. “That intermittent type of noise is probably something you can’t train your body to ignore,” he advised me. “It’s just such a jarring and unnatural thing by design.”
In my lowest moments, I thought about filling the divots with asphalt under cover of darkness. I researched the penalties for intentional damage to property in Virginia, and apparently I’d be looking at a Class 6 felony and up to five years behind bars.
That’s a tough sentence. But maybe prison would be quieter?
***
It occurred to me that I might be going mad. But a couple of neighbors reassured me that it was not my imagination. They were hearing more noise, too — even those who lived on nearby back roads. A guy who does animal trapping in the area was baffled by the number of cars hitting the strip: “I was thinking, ‘Is everybody drunk out there?’”
So I set out to investigate. I’m no Woodward or Bernstein, or even a Haberman or Swan, but I got my level and tape measure and spent some time crouched in the middle of the road measuring the divots — all the while hoping an F-250 pickup would not put a quick and violent end to my investigation. I bought a protractor and measured the angle of the road’s curves on Google Maps. I spent the better part of a day recording traffic, calculating that roughly 1 in 5 vehicles struck the strip, or one strike every three minutes and 20 seconds.
I discovered the problem is not bad drivers but a bad road. The travel lanes are just 10 feet wide — and in some places the available driving space is little more than 8½ feet, the same width as a semi-trailer. Add in the unavoidable couple of feet for the “off-tracking” that occurs when a trailer navigates a curve and it is virtually impossible to avoid the rumble strip.
“It sounds like the road design is just not good,” Judy Rochat, a transportation noise consultant, told me.
“Not a great design,” Oregon State’s Hurwitz concurred.
In addition, my measurements confirmed that VDOT had installed an “RS-3” strip, the kind that “noise concerns are most commonly associated with,” according to a VDOT memorandum, which further states that a newer, quieter type is available “to minimize the noise concerns.”
These sinusoidal strips, also called “mumble strips,” have a wave-like pattern that don’t hit tires as hard. They are just as effective at alerting drivers to lane departures but cut the external noise in half — and by two-thirds in some of the mid- to upper frequencies to which the human ear is most sensitive. And, I learned, they don’t cost any more than the old type.
“A health benefit, in the form of lower risk of hypertension, may exist to roadway residents where the sinusoidal design is applied instead of the standard design,” a study for the North Carolina Department of Transportation concluded. Meanwhile in California — where officials found rumble-strip noise has “increasingly become a concern for the public,” particularly in rural areas — the state has been retrofitting roads with the quieter strips, Rochat said.
Driving the length of my road, I also discovered that most of the section in which VDOT’s “crash analysis” claimed the improvement occurred doesn’t even have a rumble strip.
It was time to present my findings to VDOT. I didn’t have high hopes. If the department had already rejected pleas from the county supervisors and administrator, it wasn’t likely to embrace my kvetching.
At first, those low expectations were met. In an interview, Mark Nesbit, the resident engineer for my area, said it would be years before VDOT would consider installing the new sinusoidal strips on my road, or making any other changes.
How many years?
“Anywhere from 10 to 15, maybe even 20,” Nesbit replied.
By that time I’d be so deaf from all the noise that I wouldn’t notice.
But a day later, something unexpected happened. VDOT did a U-turn. In an email, a spokeswoman said a VDOT official had visited the road and agreed that there had been an “oversight” with the rumble strips. Therefore, she said, VDOT will install sinusoidal strips, after all, and it will redo its crash analysis with corrected data. Hopefully, this will lead to the state reconsidering the county’s concerns about first responders’ safety.
Some will say this is just a NIMBY victory: Journalist complains about his road and state fixes it. Maybe so. If they ever decide to award a Pulitzer in the category of Self-Interested Reporting, I hope to be considered.
But it sounds as though the experience has made a convert of Troy Austin, VDOT’s regional traffic operations director for Rappahannock and eight other counties east of the Blue Ridge. He said he plans to start ordering sinusoidal rumble strips for installation throughout the region, which covers 3,650 square miles and 415,000 people.
“Going back and looking at our current contracts,” Austin said in an interview, “the price is the same. There’s no reason not to put them in, because they’re just as effective.”
That could mean thousands of miles of quieter roads — and perhaps a model for the rest of rural America. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to hang up my protractor and get some sleep.
Dana Milbank is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.
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