Providence • Rhode Island • Federal
Throughout human history, people have been concerned about the adverse effects of excessive noise and issued edicts / passed legislation to regulate it. That doesn’t mean noise is primarily a legal issue, or that government officials — including and especially the police — are the sole way to enforce it. But noise has clearly been viewed across cultures as a threat to public welfare for millennia.
At a minimum, noise laws indicate broad public policy goals, as determined over time by legislators representing the interests and will of the residents in their respective jurisdictions. The long history of such regulations belies noise-denialist claims that few people care about noise. And in the absence of socialization and norms to curtail unhealthy noise, laws serve as a last recourse to protect those exposed to it unwillingly by others.
In the United States, excessive human-generated sound levels — often referred to as ambient or “environmental” noise — are regulated almost exclusively at the municipal and state levels.1 Thus, noise in Providence is addressed primarily under the city’s municipal code, and to a lesser degree by Rhode Island state laws.
At the federal level, U.S. noise-reduction policy (and regulatory authority) was established in 1970 under the Clean Air Act, and thus falls within the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency.2 Several specific noise sources — from workplace and aircraft noise to motor-vehicle emissions — are subject to federal oversight under a variety of regulatory frameworks.3
________________
1 Other countries, many of which — such as EU members — are far more cognizant of and concerned by the adverse health effects of excessive noise, actively regulate urban noise at the national as well as local level.
2 Sound perceived by humans is transmitted through the air, which is why excessive ambient sound levels — i.e., noise pollution — are considered a form of air pollution, and thus regulated under federal environmental policy by the EPA, which notes that “the fact that you can’t see, taste, or smell” noise pollution may explain why it hasn’t received “as much attention as other types of pollution, such as air or water pollution.”
3 Workplace noise is subject to federal occupational health and safety rules as part of broader labor law, and aircraft noise falls under interstate commerce and is regulated by the FAA.