Photo by Hossam all line.

The New York Times reports today that noise on Cairo’s streets averages 85 decibels, the equivalent of standing just 15 feet from a passing freight train. And that’s just the average. In the loudest parts of the city it can reach 95 decibels, only slightly softer than the noise produced by a jackhammer!

The loud noise on the city’s streets is not just a nuisance:

It can cause elevated blood pressure and other stress-related diseases. It can interfere with sleep, which almost always makes people more irritable. “People need a chance to sleep, to have a chance to think, in quiet,” said Dr. Nagat Amer, a physician and researcher with the national center.

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Cars and freeways are cutting through Cairo. Photo by seyerce from Flickr.

In Cairo, my spouse and I lived for a month in a high-rise in a central-city neighborhood called Garden City. Cairo, a city inhabited by about 18 million people, is notorious for its poor air quality. This report tells us that, “According to the World Health Organization, the average resident of Cairo ingests more than 20 times the acceptable level of air pollution a day.” (See here, too.) Many mornings, I’d look out of our tenth-story window and see little except the heavy brown miasma of pollution that had settled over the city. Those days, too, my throat and eyes would sting the moment I opened the window or walked outside.

By no means does all of Cairo’s air pollution come from cars. But certainly the cars sitting for hours in the city’s traffic jams belching out their exhaust fumes contribute to the problem. Sometimes the traffic does get to move, but with some hazard. In this 2006 account of Cairo’s traffic problem Reem Leila wrote that some 7,000 Cairenes were estimated to be killed in traffic accidents each year, and a further 35,000 injured. Although the number is staggering, it still is believable. If the traffic on the big, 4- or 6-lane streets that surround Garden City was by chance moving, it did so in a crazed, desperate way. (I never saw a single speed limit sign posted anywhere in the city.) Crossing such a street meant playing a heart-stopping game of Extreme Human Frogger. Read the rest of this entry »

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