OK, these giant decibel (dB) meter billboards were not made to support urban bicycle commuting. They are part of a marketing campaign to encourage consumers to buy quiet household appliances made by the company AEG-Electrolux. But if you are bicycle commuting or running errands via bike and passing by these meters in Berlin, Brussels, London, Milano, or Madrid, you can try to ride during the quieter times by looking on the web. All of the dB stats recorded by the dB meters are graphed by time and date. The site, Noise Awareness site in the United Kingdom, lets you view the noise data from the cities where these giant decibel meters are listed.
And if you are one of the many gifted children who lives on two wheels in Berkeley, and you have time on your hands this summer, here's a project. Why not put a discrete decibel meter somewhere, like at Spruce and Rose or up by Tilden Park or on Grizzly Peak, so the recreational and competitive cyclists can avoid the scenic and narrow roads during the peak times for car travel. Make sure there is a way to wirelessly convey the monitoring data to a web app. You special talented San Franciso bike riding engineers, get to work on one for Market Street and the Embarcadero.
(Jump to read a bit about the history of the noise measuring unit, the decibel.)
Photo lifted from the Noise Awareness site.
via notcot
Lifted from Wikipedia on decibel:
"A decibel is one tenth of a bel (B)."
"The bel was originally devised by engineers of the Bell Telephone Laboratories to quantify the reduction in audio level over a 1 mile (approximately 1.6 km) length of standard telephone cable. It was originally called the transmission unit or TU, but was renamed in 1923 or 1924 in honor of the Bell System's founder and telecommunications pioneer Alexander Graham Bell. In many situations, however, the bel proved inconveniently large, so the decibel has become more common."
