Noise pollution, Dutch style: some 16.5 million of us are packed into a small country and the people living in the four big cities known in Dutch as the ‘Randstad’ (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague) often live in old houses that have very little isolation. I have friends who refuse to live anywhere with upstairs neighbours, and in my case here in Amsterdam I can hear the neighbours’ dog yelping at passers-by. When I lived in Nijmegen, the old man downstairs had the telly on really loud. The day that stopped, we found out he had passed away.

We can’t just move to the country: for most jobs you need to leave within 10 km of your work because beyond that employers would have to pay for your travel costs and therefore will not hire you. Coming by car means major traffic jams, and so we live in town and often bike to work. You can’t rent anything in the country, you have to buy, which many people can’t do. Oh, and in the country, they have bored youth with noisy, high-pitched scooters driving around, which has become a major noise pollution issue.

So tape your neighbours in the hopes of getting them evicted is a new strategy in the country’s second biggest city, Rotterdam. Granted, many people will pipe down if you ask them nicely, but many people, and I am sorry to say, usually with children, have no idea what kind of anti-social racket they are making.

“Since February, Rotterdam is offering possible victims of ‘noise pollution’ a noise-o-meter to monitor the nuisance. The noise-o-meter is part of a campaign to counter ‘neighbourhood terror’. According to a city survey last year, some 49,000 people in the Netherlands’ second major city say they regularly suffer serious nuisance from neighbours. The noise-o-meter offers ‘an objective measure of the sound, which gives us a stronger legal case in case of an eviction request,’ said city executive Hamit Karakus about the new weapon.”

(Links: nrc.nl, Photo of db meter by jepoirrier, some rights reserved.)