GINTA — Shared spaces need to be minded the right way

Daniela Ginta writes for the Armchair Mayor News on Fridays.

COLUMN — It doesn’t matter if it is 4 p.m., 11 p.m. or 3 a.m. Heavy trucks roll downhill on Highway 5A in the vicinity of which my family and I happen to dwell and the noise is overwhelming almost continuously. Every now and then, deafening. A bit like a helicopter attempting to land in your backyard. As I write this, the door to the deck is open and the sound comes trumping in. It is never quiet where we live, not even at night.

In fact, nighttime makes everything sound even louder as the city falls asleep and many sources of noise go to sleep as well.

Shutting the windows works as long as it’s not too hot. When the temperature rises, windows need to be open so the air can circulate and allow for what we all desire in the summer: a cooling breeze. Unless the said trucks continue to roll downhill with deafening roars, which they do, day and night, in which case the said breeze has to be postponed. In short, noise prevails at any hour and that is a life changer.

According to the Canadian Center for Occupational Health and Safety, sound is what we hear, and noise is unwanted sound. A recent trip to Barkerville followed by another to countryside Alberta convinced me: all I could hear during the night was the buzzing of crickets, and morning came with sweet bird songs.

Here by the old highway, though, even birds seem noise-stressed and instead of sweet morning songs, they release the gnarly sounds of morning quarrels. Quite the 6 a.m. noise sandwich if you ask me. From simply being an annoyance at first, noise has become a cause of sleeplessness and, truth is, sleep is something I had very little of during my sons’ baby years so no one should fault me for wishing to make up for it now that we’re moving into teen, teenage hood respectively.

I asked around to see what our neighbours think. Depending on their proximity to the road, all people I talked to are bothered by noise and yet there have been a lot of shrugging shoulders too. Surely there must be some bylaw that prevents such ungodly noise from pouring over innocent heads day and night. After all, there are bylaws that prevent people from producing loud noise, say construction noises, between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.

I never thought I’d become a pursuant of bylaws until now. You see, the one I have my eye on at the moment speaks of ‘quiet, peace, rest, enjoyment, comfort and convenience of individuals or the public’ and how they should not be altered in any way by unwanted noise. Incessant traffic, helicopter-like noise, more than qualifies as a disturbance.

If I did not think it until now, the last few weeks have sure chased my thoughts that way: tranquility is not a privilege but a right, especially at nighttime, and if one does not opt to live near a landing strip or on top of a noisy pub.

Being able to sleep at night for at least seven hours if one so desires, should never be subject to any if or maybe. During the hours of no sleep I ponder over questions such as: what do the noisy trucks transport and where? How much of what is transported with a whirl of cacophony is of actual use for most of us and why are we silently agreeing (us, not them) to see the price hike constantly — in pollution from both manufacturing and transport, in noise that causes stress and reduces quality of life, in marketing campaigns that muffle the thoughts and molds will into a ‘yes, sure’ just because something is there and we’re too busy and rushed to take the time to say no.

A shared space like the one a community shares, has to be protected at all times from anything that can harm it or runs the risk of reducing the quality of life for anyone in it, be it visible threats such as crime of any kind, as well as invisible threats such as pesticides, noise, and pollution.

It is up to each of us to address any kind of threat and keep our common space livable and protect it as such. If the old saying ‘There is no place like home’ is to stand true, we should be the ones making it happen. Not by barricading ourselves behind closed doors and windows, but by being able to enjoy the home we all share: our city community, from one growing end to another.

Daniela Ginta is a mother, scientist, writer and blogger. She can be reached at daniela.ginta@gmail.com, or through her blog at http://www.thinkofclouds.com.