Noise pollution is Taiwan’s remaining blind spot. Vehicle-mounted speakers turn streets into echo chambers of blaring ads for everything from grocery specials to political candidates.
I remember Taipei’s open rubbish dumps and filthy waterways from 1978. Now Taiwan has made huge improvements with ambitious health and environmental policies, such as universal health insurance and trash recycling.
So why can Taiwan not vault into the modern era by enforcing its existing noise laws and limiting sound trucks? Street noise stress clearly contributes to the nation’s leading causes of death and to other social problems.
The WHO estimates that 2 or 3 percent of heart attack and stroke deaths are due to noise — and that is in the vastly quieter European region.
“Noise accounts for over 1 million healthy years of life lost annually to ill health, disability or early death in western European countries,” the WHO says. “This burden was due to annoyance and sleep disturbance, but also to heart attacks, learning disabilities and tinnitus… Noise is linked to stress levels and increased blood pressure. There is increasing evidence that noise-induced stress raises the risk of cardiovascular disease and that it negatively affects mental health.”
“Children [exposed to] noise have been shown to have delayed reading age, poor attention levels and high stress levels. High levels of road traffic noise have been associated with impaired reading and mathematics performance,” it says.
Think about that the next time a sound truck sends your blood pressure surging as it interrupts your conversation, your family dinner or your children’s studies. Who is benefiting from these interruptions? Not Taiwanese.
Yet there is no reason this cannot be changed. Ask the Europeans, who find such a tyranny of screeching voices and blaring music unthinkable. Or look at Japan, where sound trucks are most notably used by rightist gangsters who extort money from businesses that pay to make them go away. Does Taiwan want to be associated with the former’s peace and quality of life, or the latter’s extortion and bullying by criminals?
Although useful for controlling illiterate populations (which Taiwan’s certainly is not), sound trucks disturb visitors as well as residents. Jet-lagged tourists disturbed while trying to nap in their hotel rooms will tell you that noise pollution does not fit the nation’s new classy image.
Who will you vote for: the candidates who defend voters’ health and quality of life? Or those who hammer your ears and insult your intelligence with the same message for months on end?
Not to mention that sound trucks snarl traffic and waste fuel as they slowly troll the streets in vehicles that have no need to be there. That does not sound very “green,” does it?
Renouncing campaign sound trucks is a first step in addressing the nation’s noise pollution (outdoor speakers blaring shop announcements nonstop is next). Progress in this area will increase public awareness of stress as a contributing factor in non-communicable diseases.
If the majority’s health is considered in public policy, commercial noise pollution would be no more encouraged than tobacco — which at least some people enjoy, something one cannot say about sound trucks. In 1978, I would have sworn that Taiwanese would never give up smoking, but good leadership has made vast progress in this area.
Saving thousands of lives by reducing stroke and cardiac fatalities by 2 or 3 percent might not even require new laws. And the nation’s leaders have shown admirable determination to reduce health hazards and bring the quality of life closer to that in Western nations.
Yet in Taiwan, my inquiries into enforcement of noise laws have been met with resistance, apathy and even threatening bluster. This did not happen in the other five nations I have researched vehicle-mounted speaker noise in.
It is time for environmental regulators and police to enforce existing noise laws by monitoring or limiting sound trucks. At the very least, existing laws regarding decibel limits could be enforced across the nation.
Meanwhile, candidates should renounce sound trucks. This shows the social responsibility that we expect from our leaders, and it would gratify and impress voters. Plus the first candidates to do so will get free positive publicity, as well as saving money to spend on healthier media.
If political candidates renounce this flagrant noise pollution, a grateful public will hear the message — that they care about their constituents’ wellbeing.
Val Crawford was a staff editor for UN University in Tokyo and WHO Bulletin in Geneva, Switzerland. She now teaches at the Taipei Medical University.
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