Okay, when you put it that way I don't like the article because I flat disagree with it.

You flippantly throw out "dBA" out there like you know what it means or like nobody has died on that hill over and over and over again. We don't measure "dBA." In most municipalities (not all) noise violations are a function of instantaneous noise but noise remedy is a function of L(eq)24 which is measured in octave bands. Some municipalities (Portland, OR for example) even do violations in octave-band contours - because somebody there fought for it once.

The FAA, on the other hand, legislates noise level on DNL (Day/Night Level) contours and instantaneous violation. These approaches are the result of dozens of experts hashing shit out for dozens of months to the tune of millions of dollars just to make sure the measurements are useful and appropriate.

ON THE OTHER HAND

One of our clients had a problem neighbor once. Their project was too noisy. We recommended noise traps and a large, tall wall. The neighbor? She wanted some goddamn rose bushes. Now - I can give you the acoustical attenuation of "rose bushes". Klark Technik actually ran numbers on foliage once and I can give you the octave band attenuation. It's on the order of a dB and a half above 4K if you've got dozens of feet of them. Sound goes through a forest as if it isn't there, and through a rose bush in much the same way. Nonetheless, as soon as the rose bushes went in the neighbor could no longer "hear" the project across the street. Epic win!

I had another project. Pumping station in a ritzy district down on the water. And because there was a nasty pure tone coming out of the exhaust, I had to do two stacked $20k sound traps. All in all it cost about $150k to knock down 8dB of pure tone. But the city did it. Because this neighbor? He wanted a new Porsche. A new Porsche, he said, would make him care less about the pure tone.

What happens when he moves and sells the house? The City gets to put in the $150k traps again, and probably be sued for negligence in bribing the former occupant with a Porsche.

It's condescending of you to assume that the United States is somehow more beknighted in its measurement of metrics than Europeans are, and it's entitled of you to assume that metrics you don't understand are somehow inappropriate for use - and that's the whole argument of the article.

How do you measure and understand urban pollution?

Fucking science. Ozone, particulates, NOx, settled fucking shit.

You know better than I that dBA noise contours are used all the freakin' time. However, it's used so much because it is easy to measure, not necessarily because it is the best measure.

No. I reject this entirely and utterly out of hand, and you should, too. We use the measurements we use because they are the best the experts in the field have been able to come up with, to defend, to implement, to legislate and to otherwise put into practice. You're acting as if someone pulled this shit out of his ass one day and we all just sort of went along because we're fucking idiots who don't know better and it's offensive. More than that, if you're going to take this sort of approach with other people's expertise you're gonna get your academic teeth kicked in.

I can give you one fuckin' number to tell you how loud your footprints are in your downstairs neighbor's living room. But that one fuckin' number takes me half a day of measurement, another day of calcs, and fifteen thousand dollars worth of equipment. I'd love to show you exactly how a thumper works but if I were a member of ASTM it'd cost me $52. And all that is for a double-digit number, precision 0 decimal points, arguable in a court of law if I show my work (which runs to 20 printed pages per number).

And that's just what I know - but I have the experience to know that if I think something is really goddamn simple, yet people cling to it like a goddamn battleground, it probably isn't. yet here we are saying "well shit if the jungle savages of Borneo don't like lats'n'longs there must be something wrong with them."

Wrong.

INCORRECT.

The purpose of precision data collection is to purge any future conflict of all the human contextual relativist bullshit that causes people to scalp each other over whose trees they are to pick. I can look my property lines up on a map. I can look my property lines up from space. I can point out that my neighbor mows my yard as if it were his own. Contextually I can determine that it ain't worth fighting about and Google's impression of who owns the crabapple tree doesn't matter 'cuz both our kids play in it.

But if they decided to build a wall there I'd want some nice empirical evidence as to whether they were building on their property or mine.

Instead of getting people to where they want to go, planners have fetishized travel-time-savings and use it to justify spending billions.

I've done major transport projects. Planners "fetishize" travel-time savings because the function of a road is to transport people from one place to another as quickly and safely as possible. As "pleasantly"? There's a reason we have no metrics for "pleasantness" and if we can't even agree on what that is it's fucking asinine to assume that geospacial systems will somehow jeopardize it.

The British mapped the world in lats'n'longs because they wanted universal maps that any jackass could use for dead reckoning anywhere in the goddamn world. The Inuit didn't because they only cared about their trade routes. And if the British had been forced to use the Inuit system, the Inuit would have had a leg up forever because the world would have been mapped in the Inuit style and everyone else would have had to convert from Inuit.

Data is data. Policy is policy. If your policy sucks, don't injure the data. If the data is more powerful than your policy, rewrite your policy. Don't insist that absolutes need to be relatives because they hurt your feelings or some shit.