“[U]nnecessary, excessive, and offensive noise threatens the … constitutional rights of the citizens of the community to privacy and freedom from public nuisance, and is detrimental to the health, comfort, safety, and welfare of the citizenry.”
— Providence municipal code (Chapter 16, Article III)
Like every other municipality in the world, Providence cannot control the weather. But like most cities, it expends tremendous effort to try mitigate weather’s effects on the health, safety, and well-being of its residents — from clearing snow from the roads in the winter, to planting trees to provide shade from dangerous heat in the summer, to planning for torrential rain and flooding.
By contrast, the city government has far more control over the sources of excessive noise, yet shows little effort to prevent their adverse effects on those same residents. Instead, and contrary to the policy declaration above, the mayor and City Council mostly leave noise to the police department to address, which generally only responds retroactively to incidental complaints.1
Given that Providence residents have complained about noise for years, and yet it remains an ongoing issue, it’s clear the city government can and must do more to address the prevalence of excessive, unhealthy, and unnecessary noise — as other municipalities around the U.S. and the rest of the world routinely do. This includes:
- Declaring noise a threat to public health and rejecting recursive noise-denialism that “cities are noisy,” which merely serves to perpetuate a dysfunctional and anti-social status quo, and
- Educating residents on the adverse health effects of noise, as the city and state do with other public health issues
- Measuring noise levels to determine their severity, sources, and locations
- Developing an official public policy to actively prevent noise by implementing basic proposals to proactively address rampant noise sources, including motor vehicles, commercial venues, and leafblowers
- Analyzing its implementation of municipal noise policies and their effectiveness (or lack thereof) in reducing noise levels
If you’d like to volunteer to help reduce noise in Providence,
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1 There is no public evidence that the Providence city government even attempts to prevent noise.