Councillor Tony Valente wants the City of North Vancouver to do more to limit noise from vehicles in the community.
“People operating vehicles under rapid acceleration and deceleration can have direct impacts on public safety while generating peak noise levels,” he says in his notice of motion the council will be debating at a meeting today.
The former chair of the bike advocacy group HUB Cycling, Valente wants city staff to investigate and report back to the council on how vehicular noise can be mitigated, and how the city can enforce noise infractions.
He also wants the staff to pilot and utilise crowd-sourcing and other existing technology solutions to monitor noise across the city and identify problem areas in the community.
In his Notice of Motion, Valente said the City of North Vancouver had not reviewed and updated its Noise Bylaw since 2011. The impetus for the revision, he said, came from the fact that CNV had just declared its goal of being the “healthiest small city in the world”.
The council’s strategic plan, he argued, also included a vision for a vibrant city where dynamic public spaces provided opportunities for connection and enabled residents to engage with their community.
Unchecked vehicular noise was a barrier to the realisation of that vision, he said.
Valente quoted a Toronto Public Health report, ‘How Loud is too Loud’, which found that nearly 60 per cent of noise in Toronto could be attributed to traffic. Low-income areas, it found, were 11 times likely to be noisier than high-income areas.
Valente said the WHO regional office for Europe too had done research that found outdoor noise could have health impacts on sleep and cognitive ability and it could also impact cardiovascular health.
“Canadian municipalities have taken action on noise by successfully enabling enforcement, implementing new technologies and engaging their communities,” he said in this notice of motion.
Why doesn’t Mr. Valente do something that could actually IMPROVE the quality of life for city residents such as put a stop on this endless development so those huge, noisy and environmentally disastrous trucks could be put off our streets?
Maybe he could do something about reducing taxes for all those small business just hanging on by a thread? How about freezing city staff and departments incomes for a year? What about a small thing like demanding the end of those free dinners for mayor/council/staff every Monday night.
The city still has the largest number of low earners/single parents/people on very limited pensions on the North Shore – why doesn’t he think about truly representing THEM????