9 ms·

How Amsterdam’s Airport Is Fighting Noise Pollution with Land Art

147 points by jath2 8y ago

namenotrequired 8y ago
Funny to see this here :) Born and raised right next to what is now Buitenschot, lived there until 3 years ago. For the last few years, my brother and I had the unusual habit of going for a run over these ridges and ditches every Sunday. There are in fact at least two listening ears, a few hundreds of meters apart, but they’re not exactly opposite each other so they don’t communicate. Also we never realized the meaning of that weird pond haha. AMA
- gpvos 8y ago
  When was Buitenschot built? (I grew up a few 100 m further away, but left about 30 years ago; I had no idea they had built this there now.)
  - namenotrequired 8y ago
    Hi fellow Hoofddorper :) It’s relatively new, it was built between 2011 and 2013.
gumby 8y ago
There are a lot of opportunities to make functional structures attractive (even attractions in themselves) but this approach seems to have fallen into abeyance, in particular in the USA and the UK, for some reasons over the past 50 years. For example instead of brutalist bollards and jersey barriers, pedestrian ways could be set aside via grade elevation or attractive, gapped structures that invite walking instead of looking threatening. Water plants could have "water temples" again. It seems like some theory that doing anything beyond the functional minimum is a waste of the taxpayer's money. But isn't a crude structure also a tax on the psyche?
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Remember that barriers to protect pedestrians work two ways: to protect them from cars, but also to restrain them from getting into car territory. Gapped barriers have a place but do not stop drunks from wandering into traffic. Some gaps, if they obstruct sight lines for either car or pedestrian, can be worse than having no barrier. Bollards (wide gap structures) are not for protecting pedestrians. They are very dangerous for fast-moving vehicles. Bollards are to stop slow stuff like cars trying to park. They are for keeping drivers from driving into defined areas, not for shielding pedestrians from car accidents. Bollards are placed to stop cars entering city parks, not between a sidewalk and the highway.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    Source? Bollards are used extensively in the US to protect from either ram-raiding burglaries or car-ramming terrorist attacks. For example, bollards stopped the vehicle from the 2007 Glasgow Airport attack from entering the terminal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Glasgow_Airport_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Glasgow_Airport_attack
    - toomanybeersies 8y ago
      Glasgow is in Scotland, not the USA.
      - bobthepanda 8y ago
        An example in New York: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/05/18/what-stopped-car-times-square-closer-look-bollards/101851466/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/05/18/what-stopped-... The point is that if people are going to insinuate that bollards are not intended for protecting pedestrians, there had better be some evidence to the contrary. (They may not actually do so in the same way that guardrails don't actually help, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/business/highway-guardrail-may-be-deadly-states-say.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/business/highway-guardrai...)
jws 8y ago
Noise power and perceived volume are nonlinear. When the article says: These simple ridges have reduced noise levels by more than half. they are speaking of power. This means a reduction in perceived noise of about 1/6th. It is about the minimum change at which a person says "Oh yeah, that's quieter." Later in the article they mention including more measures from the airlines' planes and operating procedures to achieve a total of a 10db reduction, which gets rid of 90% of the energy and people will say "Oh yeah, that's about half as loud."
- sandworm101 8y ago
  I work with aircraft (big helicopters) and field noise complaints. I find time of day and weather mean far more than actual noise energy. 7pm, sunset, calm wind, sunday = noise complaint. We never get complaints at 11am on a windy or rainy tuesday. I am very polite on the phone, but if you choose to retire beside an AIRBASE! Our helicopters have been flying over your house decades before it was ever a house. Sue your real estate agent for not telling you exactly why zoning limits your neighbourhood to two-story non-commercial structures.
  - Washuu 8y ago
    Weather does have an affect on noise along with the differential between air temperature near the ground and higher up. It is common for the local government testing facility to send out notices to expect louder than normal booms from rocket testing during different weather.
    - sandworm101 8y ago
      I dont think it is physics. People are eating dinner outside in good weather. There is also a group dynamic. Some people call on speakerphone and it is obvious they are just showing thier dinner guests that they know my phone extension. That senario, the likelihood that people are eating dinner as a group outside, is the best means of prediction. We alter our operations as best we can accordingly. There is a common joke in air forces, at least western air forces: Plane to loud? Did you see a red star on it? You're welcome.
userbinator 8y ago
Looks like the same design as in a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber
oh5nxo 8y ago
Article did not spesifically mention air layers, temperature inversion and downward refracted sound waves. Curved waves in the images imply this condition, no? Tropospheric propagation in hamspeak. Changing the color of the landscape might also have a small effect on how the area heats up on sunlight and so how often unusual sound propagation develops. silly...
Anechoic 8y ago
I'd really like to see a technical analysis of this project - I've checked the usual spots (JASA, INCE Journal, Journal of Sound & Vibration, etc) and couldn't find anything. Google searches just lead to Paul De Kort's writeup, and similar articles. A little background about issues involved: if you have a noise source on (or just above) the ground, and a receiver on (or just above) the ground with line-of-sight to one another, there are three paths that noise can take from the source to the receiver: 1. The source can emit sound that goes up into the atmosphere, but under certain atmospheric conditions, that sound can be reflected back down to the receiver. 2. The sound travels directly, in straight line, between the source and receiver. 3. The source emits sound that travels downward at a shallow angle into the ground, and is reflected up to the receiver. For path #3, if the ground is acoustically "hard" (generally meaning non-porous), the reflected ground path adds to the noise heard at the receiver. If the sound is acoustically "soft", generally porous, the sound is absorbed [0] so the reflected sound does not add to the direct sound, and the resulting total noise is quieter compared to the situation with hard ground. This explains the reduction in sound level when the land was plowed - the hard ground (dense, packed soil) was transformed into soft ground (loose, tilled soil). This also explains why background noise levels drop when snow is on the ground. It looks like the Schiphol landscaping addresses mostly #3, possibly #2 (by blocking direct LOS between the source and receiver). This is interesting, but the same can also be achieved by a noise wall at the airport taxi and run-up areas (which is the typical solution), or creating a wide, dense tree belt. The claim is that spacing the berms by the wavelength of the (presumably dominant) airport frequency creates greater reduction, but I'd really like to view technical data to see how well that works. The articles claims the berms have "reduced noise levels by more than half" - is that in terms of sound pressure, sound power, or sound perception? If sound perception, that's ~10 dB and that's really impressive. If sound power, that's around 6 dB, which is decent. If sound pressure, that's 3 dB, which is strictly in the "meh" category. [0] Technically the sound isn't absorbed, it goes through a phase change so that the reflected sound cancels out part of the direct sound.
- dmos62 8y ago
  This is the kind of insight and commentary that keeps me coming back to the comments section.
jadbox 8y ago
Is it just me or has Amsterdam/Netherlands been on Hacker News (and other outlets) more and more... almost feels like a weekly occurrence now. I've visited Netherlands last year and was fully impressed with their entire culture.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  NL is small, densely populated and wealthy. That makes it an ideal testbed for lots of stuff so you will see a relatively large number of experiments taking place here some of which are newsworthy. It's also why we have an enormous offering of car brands and models none of which are produced domestically. It's a good market to try new stuff in.
- DonHopkins 8y ago
  Maybe it's all the exploding iPads! https://hn.algolia.com/?query=amsterdam&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastMonth&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=amsterdam&sort=byPopularity&pr... https://nos.nl/artikel/2246728-ipad-ontploft-in-apple-store-amsterdam-winkel-ontruimd.html https://nos.nl/artikel/2246728-ipad-ontploft-in-apple-store-... https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/2452861/i-pad-ontploft-in-apple-store-amsterdam-winkel-ontruimd https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/2452861/i-pad-ontploft-in-ap...
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  a small European country that has managed to become a global powerhouse in agriculture and technology—the Netherlands. Humorously, the quote is from an article critical of The Netherlands: https://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/the-netherlands-can-feed-the-world-heres-why-it-shouldnt-20180111/ https://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/the-netherlands-can-fe... The world seems to largely forget that the Dutch had a major empire at one time. I'm not quite sure why that is. But I think you wouldn't make a comment like this about, say, Great Britain. We read stuff about the US and UK all the time and take it as a given. No one is surprised to read the umpteenth American or British piece. How The Netherlands manages to be such a powerhouse and seemingly go largely unrecognized as such strikes me as an intriguing question in its own right.
adamnemecek 8y ago
Speaking of Amsterdam Airport and noise pollution, through the whole airport there are speakers that repeat the phrase "Mind your step" every 10 seconds of so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uTySV1Gkh4&t=28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uTySV1Gkh4&t=28s I've had to spend quite a bit of time at the airport unfortunately (say 6 hours each time) and it felt almost like Chinese water torture. I could hear it for the next day after leaving the airport. I find it very hostile.
- stevesimmons 8y ago
  If you regularly travel through Schiphol, you quickly work out where and where not to sit. Don't sit for an hour at a gate closest to end of a moving footpath. You will indeed go mad from the "Mind your step" and other announcements. If you leave from the D pier, for instance, enjoy a coffee at the restaurant halfway down until 30 mins before your flight departs. Then walk to your gate, getting there just in time to stand near the front of the queue for your boarding group. (I had three years of travelling Schiphol to London each week, and now do it roughly monthly...)
  - adamnemecek 8y ago
    Haha, thanks for the heads up. I've been there less than 10 times total and I tried to figure it out previously but I never wanted to go too far from my gate. I'll keep this in mind for next time.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  These are typically at the exits of the moving walkways to warn people that they are about to hit terra firma, and face first if they are not paying attention which is pretty easy given the length of some of them.
  - adamnemecek 8y ago
    You are correct but it's hard to escape that sound. Maybe I was always at the wrong terminal.
  - 8y ago
Hydraulix989 8y ago
I wish SJC could do something more about the noise pollution. At every hour of the day starting at 6 AM sharp (and often at night past the "curfew"), there are deafeningly loud jets taking off and landing overhead to the point where it even disrupts indoor conversation. When I lived there in Santa Clara, I had to wear earplugs to sleep at night, and needless to say, I was out of there once my lease was up.
Mizza 8y ago
This could have been made into an awesome BMX/skate park. In terms of usage, I don't know what gets better return for public land. Next time you're at a park with a skatepark, I bet you'll see it's packed, and generally there is a totally disused baseball diamond next to it.
- Improvotter 8y ago
  There aren't that many people willing to go to a skate park next to an airport, it's way too far.
  - Mizza 8y ago
    I once flew to China to skate SMP outside of Shanghai. Every year thousands of people go to Rutland, Ohio for Skatopia. If the airport is accessible by transit, of course people will go to use it. At least more people than would go to visit "land art". Anyway, the point is that you're building it anyway and it looks super skate/bikeable because it's just a bunch of ridges. Add a few more obstacles and bam, awesome skatepark.
amelius 8y ago
> These simple ridges have reduced noise levels by more than half. Great, now we can increase air traffic by a factor of two! /s
trumped 8y ago
> The plan is to achieve a noise reduction of up to 10 decibels. If they can achieve that goal, it sounds very good [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel

147 points by jath2 8y ago

Funny to see this here :) Born and raised right next to what is now Buitenschot, lived there until 3 years ago. For the last few years, my brother and I had the unusual habit of going for a run over these ridges and ditches every Sunday. There are in fact at least two listening ears, a few hundreds of meters apart, but they’re not exactly opposite each other so they don’t communicate. Also we never realized the meaning of that weird pond haha. AMA

gpvos 8y ago
When was Buitenschot built? (I grew up a few 100 m further away, but left about 30 years ago; I had no idea they had built this there now.)
- namenotrequired 8y ago
  Hi fellow Hoofddorper :) It’s relatively new, it was built between 2011 and 2013.

gumby 8y ago

There are a lot of opportunities to make functional structures attractive (even attractions in themselves) but this approach seems to have fallen into abeyance, in particular in the USA and the UK, for some reasons over the past 50 years. For example instead of brutalist bollards and jersey barriers, pedestrian ways could be set aside via grade elevation or attractive, gapped structures that invite walking instead of looking threatening. Water plants could have "water temples" again. It seems like some theory that doing anything beyond the functional minimum is a waste of the taxpayer's money. But isn't a crude structure also a tax on the psyche?

sandworm101 8y ago
Remember that barriers to protect pedestrians work two ways: to protect them from cars, but also to restrain them from getting into car territory. Gapped barriers have a place but do not stop drunks from wandering into traffic. Some gaps, if they obstruct sight lines for either car or pedestrian, can be worse than having no barrier. Bollards (wide gap structures) are not for protecting pedestrians. They are very dangerous for fast-moving vehicles. Bollards are to stop slow stuff like cars trying to park. They are for keeping drivers from driving into defined areas, not for shielding pedestrians from car accidents. Bollards are placed to stop cars entering city parks, not between a sidewalk and the highway.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Source? Bollards are used extensively in the US to protect from either ram-raiding burglaries or car-ramming terrorist attacks. For example, bollards stopped the vehicle from the 2007 Glasgow Airport attack from entering the terminal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Glasgow_Airport_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Glasgow_Airport_attack
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    Glasgow is in Scotland, not the USA.
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      An example in New York: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/05/18/what-stopped-car-times-square-closer-look-bollards/101851466/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/05/18/what-stopped-... The point is that if people are going to insinuate that bollards are not intended for protecting pedestrians, there had better be some evidence to the contrary. (They may not actually do so in the same way that guardrails don't actually help, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/business/highway-guardrail-may-be-deadly-states-say.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/business/highway-guardrai...)

jws 8y ago

Noise power and perceived volume are nonlinear. When the article says: These simple ridges have reduced noise levels by more than half. they are speaking of power. This means a reduction in perceived noise of about 1/6th. It is about the minimum change at which a person says "Oh yeah, that's quieter." Later in the article they mention including more measures from the airlines' planes and operating procedures to achieve a total of a 10db reduction, which gets rid of 90% of the energy and people will say "Oh yeah, that's about half as loud."

sandworm101 8y ago
I work with aircraft (big helicopters) and field noise complaints. I find time of day and weather mean far more than actual noise energy. 7pm, sunset, calm wind, sunday = noise complaint. We never get complaints at 11am on a windy or rainy tuesday. I am very polite on the phone, but if you choose to retire beside an AIRBASE! Our helicopters have been flying over your house decades before it was ever a house. Sue your real estate agent for not telling you exactly why zoning limits your neighbourhood to two-story non-commercial structures.
- Washuu 8y ago
  Weather does have an affect on noise along with the differential between air temperature near the ground and higher up. It is common for the local government testing facility to send out notices to expect louder than normal booms from rocket testing during different weather.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    I dont think it is physics. People are eating dinner outside in good weather. There is also a group dynamic. Some people call on speakerphone and it is obvious they are just showing thier dinner guests that they know my phone extension. That senario, the likelihood that people are eating dinner as a group outside, is the best means of prediction. We alter our operations as best we can accordingly. There is a common joke in air forces, at least western air forces: Plane to loud? Did you see a red star on it? You're welcome.

userbinator 8y ago

Looks like the same design as in a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber

oh5nxo 8y ago

Article did not spesifically mention air layers, temperature inversion and downward refracted sound waves. Curved waves in the images imply this condition, no? Tropospheric propagation in hamspeak. Changing the color of the landscape might also have a small effect on how the area heats up on sunlight and so how often unusual sound propagation develops. silly...

Anechoic 8y ago

I'd really like to see a technical analysis of this project - I've checked the usual spots (JASA, INCE Journal, Journal of Sound & Vibration, etc) and couldn't find anything. Google searches just lead to Paul De Kort's writeup, and similar articles. A little background about issues involved: if you have a noise source on (or just above) the ground, and a receiver on (or just above) the ground with line-of-sight to one another, there are three paths that noise can take from the source to the receiver: 1. The source can emit sound that goes up into the atmosphere, but under certain atmospheric conditions, that sound can be reflected back down to the receiver. 2. The sound travels directly, in straight line, between the source and receiver. 3. The source emits sound that travels downward at a shallow angle into the ground, and is reflected up to the receiver. For path #3, if the ground is acoustically "hard" (generally meaning non-porous), the reflected ground path adds to the noise heard at the receiver. If the sound is acoustically "soft", generally porous, the sound is absorbed [0] so the reflected sound does not add to the direct sound, and the resulting total noise is quieter compared to the situation with hard ground. This explains the reduction in sound level when the land was plowed - the hard ground (dense, packed soil) was transformed into soft ground (loose, tilled soil). This also explains why background noise levels drop when snow is on the ground. It looks like the Schiphol landscaping addresses mostly #3, possibly #2 (by blocking direct LOS between the source and receiver). This is interesting, but the same can also be achieved by a noise wall at the airport taxi and run-up areas (which is the typical solution), or creating a wide, dense tree belt. The claim is that spacing the berms by the wavelength of the (presumably dominant) airport frequency creates greater reduction, but I'd really like to view technical data to see how well that works. The articles claims the berms have "reduced noise levels by more than half" - is that in terms of sound pressure, sound power, or sound perception? If sound perception, that's ~10 dB and that's really impressive. If sound power, that's around 6 dB, which is decent. If sound pressure, that's 3 dB, which is strictly in the "meh" category. [0] Technically the sound isn't absorbed, it goes through a phase change so that the reflected sound cancels out part of the direct sound.

dmos62 8y ago
This is the kind of insight and commentary that keeps me coming back to the comments section.

jadbox 8y ago

Is it just me or has Amsterdam/Netherlands been on Hacker News (and other outlets) more and more... almost feels like a weekly occurrence now. I've visited Netherlands last year and was fully impressed with their entire culture.

jacquesm 8y ago
NL is small, densely populated and wealthy. That makes it an ideal testbed for lots of stuff so you will see a relatively large number of experiments taking place here some of which are newsworthy. It's also why we have an enormous offering of car brands and models none of which are produced domestically. It's a good market to try new stuff in.
DonHopkins 8y ago
Maybe it's all the exploding iPads! https://hn.algolia.com/?query=amsterdam&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastMonth&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=amsterdam&sort=byPopularity&pr... https://nos.nl/artikel/2246728-ipad-ontploft-in-apple-store-amsterdam-winkel-ontruimd.html https://nos.nl/artikel/2246728-ipad-ontploft-in-apple-store-... https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/2452861/i-pad-ontploft-in-apple-store-amsterdam-winkel-ontruimd https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/2452861/i-pad-ontploft-in-ap...
DoreenMichele 8y ago
a small European country that has managed to become a global powerhouse in agriculture and technology—the Netherlands. Humorously, the quote is from an article critical of The Netherlands: https://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/the-netherlands-can-feed-the-world-heres-why-it-shouldnt-20180111/ https://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/the-netherlands-can-fe... The world seems to largely forget that the Dutch had a major empire at one time. I'm not quite sure why that is. But I think you wouldn't make a comment like this about, say, Great Britain. We read stuff about the US and UK all the time and take it as a given. No one is surprised to read the umpteenth American or British piece. How The Netherlands manages to be such a powerhouse and seemingly go largely unrecognized as such strikes me as an intriguing question in its own right.

adamnemecek 8y ago

Speaking of Amsterdam Airport and noise pollution, through the whole airport there are speakers that repeat the phrase "Mind your step" every 10 seconds of so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uTySV1Gkh4&t=28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uTySV1Gkh4&t=28s I've had to spend quite a bit of time at the airport unfortunately (say 6 hours each time) and it felt almost like Chinese water torture. I could hear it for the next day after leaving the airport. I find it very hostile.

stevesimmons 8y ago
If you regularly travel through Schiphol, you quickly work out where and where not to sit. Don't sit for an hour at a gate closest to end of a moving footpath. You will indeed go mad from the "Mind your step" and other announcements. If you leave from the D pier, for instance, enjoy a coffee at the restaurant halfway down until 30 mins before your flight departs. Then walk to your gate, getting there just in time to stand near the front of the queue for your boarding group. (I had three years of travelling Schiphol to London each week, and now do it roughly monthly...)
- adamnemecek 8y ago
  Haha, thanks for the heads up. I've been there less than 10 times total and I tried to figure it out previously but I never wanted to go too far from my gate. I'll keep this in mind for next time.
jacquesm 8y ago
These are typically at the exits of the moving walkways to warn people that they are about to hit terra firma, and face first if they are not paying attention which is pretty easy given the length of some of them.
- adamnemecek 8y ago
  You are correct but it's hard to escape that sound. Maybe I was always at the wrong terminal.
- 8y ago

Hydraulix989 8y ago

I wish SJC could do something more about the noise pollution. At every hour of the day starting at 6 AM sharp (and often at night past the "curfew"), there are deafeningly loud jets taking off and landing overhead to the point where it even disrupts indoor conversation. When I lived there in Santa Clara, I had to wear earplugs to sleep at night, and needless to say, I was out of there once my lease was up.

Mizza 8y ago

This could have been made into an awesome BMX/skate park. In terms of usage, I don't know what gets better return for public land. Next time you're at a park with a skatepark, I bet you'll see it's packed, and generally there is a totally disused baseball diamond next to it.

Improvotter 8y ago
There aren't that many people willing to go to a skate park next to an airport, it's way too far.
- Mizza 8y ago
  I once flew to China to skate SMP outside of Shanghai. Every year thousands of people go to Rutland, Ohio for Skatopia. If the airport is accessible by transit, of course people will go to use it. At least more people than would go to visit "land art". Anyway, the point is that you're building it anyway and it looks super skate/bikeable because it's just a bunch of ridges. Add a few more obstacles and bam, awesome skatepark.

amelius 8y ago

> These simple ridges have reduced noise levels by more than half. Great, now we can increase air traffic by a factor of two! /s

trumped 8y ago

> The plan is to achieve a noise reduction of up to 10 decibels. If they can achieve that goal, it sounds very good [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel