how the pandemic sensitized montrealers to sound

montreal public health has been recommending for a decade that montreal establish a noise monitoring system, or noise observatory, he said. “if we compare it to air pollution, we have a very good air quality monitoring system. but there’s nothing comparable for noise.”

cities in europe are required by the european union to systematically monitor noise data and have noise action plans, kaiser said. in canada, “there’s no overarching noise control at the federal or provincial or municipal level. it’s still something we feel is a necessity in montreal.”

in the absence of a noise oversight body, it’s up to citizens to become “squeaky wheels” to get the volume turned down.

the courts became a front in the citizen war against airplane noise in quebec more than a decade ago.

and now in côte st-luc, citizens are taking steps to file a complaint with the canadian transportation agency about noise from canadian pacific railway’s st. luc yard.

“since november, the noise got tremendously bad,” said charles guérin, who has lived on merrimac rd., near an entrance to the rail yard, for seven years. he and his neighbours, who are used to a certain level of noise, are now being woken up by train idling and activity in the yard between 2:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., he said.

“we know when there are trains there. the whole house shakes.”

cp opened a new 118,000-square-foot multi-commodity transloading facility with 11 truck loading docks inside the yard in october.

residents find the complaint process long, however. the federal transportation agency, which is a quasi-judicial tribunal dealing with complaints about railway noise and vibration, won’t conduct an investigation or a hearing until the parties exhaust all steps for what it calls “collaborative complaint resolution.”

guérin said residents so far haven’t been able to talk directly with cp. the company communicated only with municipal officials in côte st-luc.

the official word from cp is that the company has not made changes to operations that would account for an increase in noise levels around the st. luc yard.

the number and length of trains that pass on cp’s network is “strictly a function of the amount of traffic that customers tender for movement, and therefore fluctuates with the economy,” stacy patenaude, cp’s manager for government affairs and communication, said in an email, adding that the st. luc yard must operate 24 hours a day. she said the company wouldn’t comment  further when asked whether the new facility has increased activity in the yard.

the company’s promotional video for the new facility in the st. luc yard says it was intended to grow traffic.

as well, cp reported that it had broken multiple carload, revenue and tonnage records in its first quarter operating results for 2021.

therein lies the paradox of environmental noise: the more there is, the better it seems to be for the economy. and many will argue what’s good for business is good for society, even if some neighbourhoods must absorb the sounds of trucks rumbling across pavement, workers banging at construction sites, airplanes tearing through the sky and trains emitting a bone-rattling screech as they come to a halt.

but the flip side to that is the economic cost of noise pollution. and there is a cost, asserts the who and quebec public health.

in a 2015 report on environmental sound, quebec’s institut national de santé publique said a conservative estimate pegged the cost of noise pollution to the province at $680 million in 2013 alone. one well-documented economic consequence is lower property values on homes affected by transportation noise, it said. there’s also the financial cost tied to the negative health consequences of excess noise.

the city of montreal doesn’t have data on the number of people upset about transportation noise because it doesn’t track the type or location when it receives complaints, city spokesperson karla duval said in an email. in fact, the city’s website tells residents to contact adm or the railway companies about air or rail transport noise. mayor valérie plante’s office referred questions to the city’s communications office.

most people don’t know where to complain, or they’re too exasperated to wait on hold, said bill mavridis, an entrepreneur who created a mobile app in 2018 to make it easier to complain instantly about aircraft noise under trudeau airport flight paths.

when he moved to ahuntsic-cartierville borough in 2004, about 250 planes a day were flying overhead, he said. it soon became 600 a day.

mavridis said he created the aeroplainte app after adm reported receiving just 543 noise complaints in 2017. other major airports in canada were reporting thousands of noise complaints per year.

“i said there’s no way there’s no problem,” he said. “so i said how are we going to track data better? let’s give people a tool to file a complaint.”

in 2019, adm suddenly reported 48,273 complaints — two-thirds of them, it said, were transmitted through aeroplainte.

“they didn’t skyrocket,” mavridis said of the number. “they were finally representative.”

adm, which modernized its complaint management system in 2019, explained that its old system used to register multiple complaints from one person per day as one complaint.

even in the quiet of the pandemic, more people have downloaded his app, mavridis said. “i was surprised, but i figured it was because people were working from home.”

the argument of “why did you move next to the airport?” doesn’t hold, he added. the boroughs of rosemont—la petite-patrie and villeray—st-michel—parc-extension and the duvernay district of laval — all 10 to 15 kilometres from the airport — were among the top generators of complaints before the pandemic, mavridis said. none of adm’s seven fixed sound measuring stations are in ahuntsic, parc-extension or rosemont, even though they’re under flight paths, he noted. adm has one mobile station.

now, mavridis is building a citizen-based noise observatory with 40 airplane noise sensors, known as a noisys, from california tech company getnoisy. mavridis said he acquired a dozen of the noisys specifically for ahuntsic, with funding from the borough.