Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Fwd: Next to the highway

[Evan Hunt (evanh]

> In the specific case of the Peninsula project, the institutional
> underpinning of the conspiracy is Caltrans, which persists in
> adding more lanes to their highways rather than building the
> soundwalls that >>most people would prefer.<<

I agree with almost all of your message, but I couldn't let this
go by without saying how much I _hate_ soundwalls.  Hate, hate,
hate.

There's something to be said for peace and quiet in the vicinity
of freeways, but there's also something to be said for encouraging
the sanity of people who have to drive on the things.  A freeway
without soundwalls gets some glimpse of life and nature; drivers
can still feel connected to the world.  Soundwalls make a freeway
look like a cattle chute in a slaughterhouse, sterile yet vicious,
completely cut off from any reality beyond the roadway.  All they
need is advertisements and the landscape of Gilliam's _Brazil_
has come true.

Trees and hedges do a pretty good a job of acoustically insulating
a road, and they aren't inhuman.  They do take time to grow,
unfortunately, but if it was my house going up next to a road, I'd
resign myself to putting up with the noise for the few years it would
take, and save the motorists from the blight of another soundwall.
If I needed the wall immediately, I'd think about an earthen berm.
A soundwall might be all I could afford, but it'd be my last choice.