Noise pollution

Noise pollution

I want to add my (quiet) voice to those few, Indonesians and
foreigners, who from time to time raise the issue of noise
pollution. Given the great many serious ills which beset the
country, and the world, this issue may strike some as relatively
minor.

Air and water pollution, not to mention degradation of the
land and the living sources that stand on it -- and the as yet
inadequate efforts to deal with this -- is far more frequently
discussed.

Noise pollution, on the other hand, perhaps because of its
evanescence, attracts less attention, though we are all hit with
it everyday. Regulations, however ineffective, concerning noise
pollution do exist, and properly conducted environmental impact
assessments and audits attend to this question.

While there are doubtless individual, and cultural,
differences in levels of tolerance of noise pollution, it is my
impression that this issue bothers Indonesians and foreigners to
equal degrees.

The list of noise pollution sources is so long, and so
familiar to us, that it would be pointless to lay it out here.

Let us consider just one source, which on first appearances
might seem trivial: the insidious, mind-numbing electronically-
produced "jingle" that announces, from very far off, the
impending approach of the Wall's Ice Cream vendor on his tricycle
cart.

Being subjected to this once a day might be "tolerable" but in
my average (nonelite) housing complex, Wall's Ice Cream vendors
criss-cross the area from morning till evening, making repeated
runs, and repeated and prolonged assaults on the peacefulness of
the neighborhood.

By itself, the Wall's Ice Cream jingle might not be so bad,
were it not only one strand of a constant stream of other such
street-side noises produced by a wide variety of peddlers.

Fortunately, most of these ( I have counted at least 35
different types of itinerant sellers in my neighborhood) have
relatively benign (and even occasionally pleasant) call-signs --
such as the familiar tok-tok-tok of the mie seller.

Others, however, such as the obnoxious truck with the
loudspeaker calling ro-roti, ro-roti or gas-gas-gas, or the sate
sellers near my last house who used car horns run from storage
cells to announce their arrival, are not so environmentally
friendly.

Now, Wall's methods have generated copycats: the latest
innovation in my area is a vendor selling his wares to the tune
of Beethoven's Fuer Elise! Again, aside from purely esthetic
considerations, it is the constant, repetitive and cumulative
assault of these sources which aggravates the problem -- but
clearly some sources, including Wall's Ice Cream, are worse than
others.

A crucial question: who gives Wall's Ice Cream, and its ilk,
the right to inflict noise on citizens (the majority of whom
clearly do not stop these carts and buy ice cream)? I would be
interested in hearing the answer to this question, be it from
city officials, lawyers, environmental health specialists,
environmental activists, and not least from the distributor of
Wall's Ice Cream itself.

TIM G. BABCOCK

Jakarta