Calmer, Quieter Residential Areas – Stronger, Healthier Communities and a Better Quality of Life.

His 1981 book was described at the time as “the most thorough and detailed work on urban streets to date”. It contained a comparison of three streets of similar morphology in San Francisco, with different levels of car traffic: with 2,000, 8,000 and 16,000 vehicles per day. His empirical research demonstrated that residents of the street with low car traffic volume had three times more friends than those living on the street with high car traffic.

Then in 2006, a young American, Joshua Hart, travelled travelled by train, cargo ship, and bicycle in the opposite direction from his home in San Francisco to Bristol to start an MSc degree at University of the West of England and replicate Appleyard’s original research on the effects of motor traffic on community life. Bristol, has a very high level of car dependence and congestion and so was a suitable place to test Appleyard’s methods and conclusions afresh in 21st century UK.

Using resident study summary of perceptions and street diagrams illustrating the extent of social contacts between premises. They too selected three otherwise matching streets with widely different traffic .

As expected, complaints about noise and pollution and perceptions of danger and disturbance as well as measurement and observations of the same were strongly influenced by traffic flows and increased as traffic increased. Moreover, as Appleyard found, social interactions – especially cross-street interactions – fell off sharply and similarly a sense of privacy and a “home territory” shrank drastically as traffic increased.

In other words, the sense of community, neighbourliness and security were damaged by traffic flow and its physical and psychological consequences.

Hart’s work was reported in the on September 19th, 2008 and, since then, more and more studies across the UK and elsewhere have not only confimed these findings but by concentrating on health and well-being and using far larger sample sizes have gone on to highlight well supported adverse effects of traffic noise and pollution in terms of specific medical and psychological conditions.

Hart found that in the Light Traffic street (140 vehicles per day) residents on average reported having 5.35 “friends” and 6.1 “acquaintances” in the street; whereas in the Heavy Traffic Street (21,130 vehicles per day) residents on average reported having 1.15 “friends” and 2.8 “acquaintances” in the street.

To sum up, quieter, calmer neighbourhoods increase community cohesion and improve the health, the quality of life and the sense of well-being of the individuals who live there.