Do Americans care about traffic noise?

This past June my wife and my daughter and I travelled to Germany so that I could attend a conference -- and so that we could visit relatives.

One of the things that struck me as we travelled more than 1,500 miles in two weeks by car, much of it on the Autobahn, was the tremendous attention paid to mitigating sound from the highway for those who live nearby. Huge, thick, extensive, and obviously well-constructed sound barriers stood between the few houses that were near the highway and the highway itself. In fact, in most cases, it was clear that the highway had been deliberately constructed at a considerable distance from homes and apartments.

Bridges had transparent sound barriers as well -- so that noise would be mitigated and drivers could still get a nice view of rivers, lakes, and so on. Can't say I've ever seen anything like that in the United States.

I bring this up now, in a stream of consciousness sort of way, because as I type away in our metro Denver area home, Parker Road (Colorado 83), which carries more than 60,000 cars a day, is roaring right through our closed windows. This despite the fact that we are a quarter mile away from the road.

Last summer, to no avail, I lobbied the Colorado Department of Transportation for a quieter road surface prior to a resurfacing of the road. They went with concrete -- the loudest, and cheapest option. In fact, in much of Northern Europe, much effort has been invested in researching, and putting down quieter highway road surfaces. But here in the good old USA, land of the lowest bidder, the quick fix, and, apparently, the traffic noise indifferent, we go with what's loud -- and then tune it out.

And we build houses with no sound barriers that back right up to highways such as Colorado 83. It never ceases to amaze me that so many people apparently don't care about the noise. Then again, they're among the majority of modern-day Americans who've been conditioned to tune out more and more of the world around them, even as the volume gets turned up, and up, and up and up.

In fact, it seems to me that we, as a society, have become so inured to noise that many of us don't know what to do when confronted with relative silence -- so we turn on the radio, the television, and so on, out of a fear of the natural sounds that we've drowned out with our allegedly universally progressive "modernity."