Recycling Tires to Reduce Road Noise

Time to email my city planner on this one!

clipped from www.treehugger.com Traffic noise is an obvious issue for many people, particularly in high-density areas. Much of that noise comes not from engines, but from the vibrations caused by tires on the road. This can be demonstrated by the fact that, while a hybrid is notoriously silent in all-electric modes at slow speed, as soon as it speeds up (even when it remains in electric mode), the sound is not that different to any other modern, relatively efficient motor vehicle, at least to this author’s ears. Now researchers in Japan have come up with a new technology to significantly reduce traffic noise, possibly by as much as 90%, by using ‘elastic’ pavement made, appropriately enough, from old car tires. “This pavement has many additional features. One of these is resistance to ice formation, as the high elasticity allows the weight of the car to break the ice into pieces. In addition, as the high proportion of voids contributes to better drainage, slip-resistance and water-splash prevention