Select Committee on the Crossrail Bill Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160 - 179)

  160. CHAIRMAN: I remember you from before.

  161. MR ELVIN: Mr Thornely-Taylor, you have prepared a set of Powerpoint slides which you are going to speak to, and I am simply going to let you do your presentation. I will only interrupt from time to time, if it is necessary to do so. So, if you would please commence.

  162. CHAIRMAN: I hope that if any of my colleagues want to ask questions about this—because it is not easy stuff—they do so as they see fit.

  163. MR ELVIN: My Lord, I was going to suggest—and, of course, it is entirely a matter for you and the Committee—that I suspect Mr Thornely-Taylor would welcome questions as he went along.

  164. CHAIRMAN: I think it is going to be easier that way than trying to go back to some particular point in the presentation.

  165. MR ELVIN: Indeed.
  (Mr Thornely-Taylor) My Lords, I will do my best to make what I know is generally thought of as quite a difficult subject as clear as possible. I will begin, if we can see slide 4, by talking about the basics of noise and vibration, and do my best to make clear the nature of the decibel scale and all the indices that are used for measurement and assessment for noise.[42] Then I will talk about standards for the assessment of noise and vibration. I will go on to talk about mitigation—using that in the environmental assessment sense ways of minimising noise and vibration—and I will say something lastly about the way in which levels of noise and vibration are predicted.

  166. MR ELVIN: Mr Thornely-Taylor, just so this is absolutely clear, a draft of this presentation was sent to Messrs Sharpe Pritchard, who are the Agents for the two London local authorities—London Borough of Havering and London Borough of Camden—which have outstanding general noise issues on behalf of the London local authorities, and that you will make appropriate comments as you go through to reflect qualifications which they referred to in subsequent correspondence.
  (Mr Thornely-Taylor) Yes, I will. If we can move to slide 5, clearly there are several ways in which noise and vibration are of interest in this project.[43] There are construction issues, both in terms of surface construction of the relatively conventional kind, worksites at ground level with construction plant operating in them, and then of course there is tunnel construction, which is the driving of tunnels underground, the excavation of stations and other works underground. From the operational point of view, there is surface operation of the railway, the passage of rail vehicles along the track; there is also the operation of a very substantial amount of what I have referred to as "fixed plant", meaning everything from tunnel ventilation systems to station air-conditioning, transformers—all items of that kind—and there are other surface operation areas such as depots and sidings, which also come under that heading. Then, last but by no means least, there is the operation of Crossrail underground—that is the passage of trains in the tunnels. As I think we all know, there are tunnels in London that you can hear, and I will be talking quite a lot about that topic. May we move to slide 6.[44] I will begin with the basics. Noise is traditionally described as unwanted sound. Sound is vibration of the air as a result either of a surface vibrating and causing radiation of air vibration waves away from it, or by aerodynamic or thermodynamic vibration of air itself. I think most people now are familiar with the use of the word "decibel", although it tends to be abbreviated into dB—a little "d" and a capital "B". The reason for the capital "B" is it is named after Alexander Graham Bell who actually devised a system called "a bell", which was rather large and it has been divided into ten to call it the "decibel". The most interesting thing about this slide is the capital letter A, and we will hear quite often reference to either dB(A), or later on I will be talking about other indices which also include the capital letter A. That is an important feature of the scale that is used, because the human ear is nothing like a physical instrument. Its response to sounds of low pitch and high pitch is not at all the same as its response to sounds around the middle of the pitch scale, and we have to take that into account. If you took a basic sound level meter that did nothing but measure the amplitude of those air vibrations I was referring to, the number it would give you would not correspond to human perception of loudness because the human ear is very bad at picking up low-frequency sounds—rumbles, roars—and bad at picking up very high-frequency sounds. Instruments have to be fitted with electronic weighting networks to make them behave slightly more like the human ear so that the index that is used to measure loudness and other forms of human response to sound comes up with a better relationship between the measured number and people's actual judgment of what it sounds like. I will say quite a bit more about this effect later on.

  167. Just to stop you there, of course the dB(A) is sometimes referred to as the `A-weighting'.

   (Mr Thornely-Taylor) That is quite correct. The `A' is A-weighting, and I will be saying a little bit more about some other forms of weighting on a later slide. For most everyday noises, the basic feature of the decibel scale is that you use it to express changes in proportions. It is a scale for saying when things have doubled and when they have halved.[45] It is not like a temperature scale, it is not like a measure of concentration of atmospheric pollutants where you are simply stating in old physical terms how much of something there is out there. The decibel scale is uniquely about changes and that happens all the way through and this is the basic one to bear in mind, that for everyday noises, about a 10 dB increase is perceived as about double the loudness, and that happens all the way up the scale, 30 to 40, 40 to 50, 50 to 60 and so on because the decibel scale measures proportions and it is telling you each time it goes up by ten that there is about a doubling of the loudness. That becomes quite important when we look at ways in which varying noises are expressed in terms of a composite index. The opposite of course is true if you have a 10 dB decrease and the loudness is about halved. There are some exceptions to that which I will come to, but that is a very useful rule of thumb to start with. If we could move to slide 8, we now go to much smaller changes.[46] If the sound which we can hear from the projector in the room were suddenly to change by one decibel, 1 dB, or if any other continuous, unvarying sound suddenly dropped by 1 dB, it would only just be possible to detect a change in loudness. If we all went out of the room and came back in and that noise source had changed by 3 dB, which is the next slide, slide 9, we would just about perceive that its loudness had changed.[47] If we were sitting in the room and there was a sudden change of 3 dB, that would be quite clearly noticeable, but, if there is a lapse of time between the noise changing from, say, 60 to 63, that is about the smallest change we would notice unless it happened instantaneously. Moving to slide 10, it is quite common to show in textbooks and talks of this kind either a thermometer or some scale explaining what decibel levels correspond to for sounds in everyday life, and it is always difficult to do that.[48] We have this amazingly quiet level at the bottom of 10 dB(A), falling leaves, and the difficulty is that I do not know anywhere on the planet which is quiet enough to be able to measure 10 dB(A). I think the quietest place ever measured was the rim of the Grand Canyon which was 14 dB(A), and I have measured 19 on Foulness Island, but it is effectively silence, and indeed the whisper at 20 dB(A) is so quiet that most people would consider it no noise at all.

  168. So what we commonly think of as a silent, very quiet background in the country is likely to be somewhere in the region of 19 or 20 dB?
  (Mr Thornely-Taylor) Yes. My experience on Foulness Island was at the time of my first experience, not in this room but another one nearby, and I am embarrassed to say it was 37 years ago for the Maplin Development Bill. I went to Foulness Island and on a totally still day with no vehicles for many miles, no wind, no sources of any kind that one could notice, 19 was the lowest I could measure and even that probably had a contribution from the instrument's own internal circuitry. You have to get up to about 30 which is there as a bedroom, and that is regarded as an ideal noise level for a bedroom. Again, it would be difficult to hear very much. There is a step up to 43 which is identified as a wind turbine. It depends obviously where you are as to what the level is. This would be a figure at a substantial distance from a wind turbine at a residential location and we move gradually up to the living room, office, in the car 77, stereo music, well, maybe 87—

  169. LORD YOUNG OF NORWOOD GREEN: I think there is a special index for stereo music for teenagers! That could be up to the pneumatic drill level, I would think!

  170. MR ELVIN: My Lord, you took the words out of my mouth!

  171. LORD YOUNG OF NORWOOD GREEN: I was thinking about iPods in a train with that horrible tinny sound that is audible from one end of the carriage to the other.
  (Mr Thornely-Taylor) And indeed very high levels can be produced by those and hearing damage is a real issue with people who wear iPods. Indeed, once we get up into the 90s, we start talking hearing damage. With industrial noise at 95, you would have triggered action levels according to the Noise of Work Regulations because continual exposure for a lifetime at 95 would expose a proportion of the population to permanent hearing loss, and 115 is a very unpleasant noise indeed. One of the first loud noises I was ever exposed to when I first came into this field was a sudden burst at 124 at a factory that was testing compressed aircraft engine starters and, as a callow youth, I immediately clapped my hands to my ears and crumpled to the ground; it was extremely unpleasant. The 141 would be immediately damaging, and it says "aeroplane", but you would be standing within metres of an aero-engine and it is most unlikely that anyone would really do that. The range is enormous, as you can see, and the human ear is capable of hearing a vast range of sound levels. If we move on to slide 11, here we move into the realms of sound that is much more complex than the examples I gave earlier of a continuous sound suddenly changing in level.[49] In circumstances such as this, we are frequently dealing with fluctuating noise levels, noise from individual events like passing vehicles, aircraft or trains, and, if you stood by a railway or under a flight path with a simple sound level meter, all you would get is a lot of different levels. It would fall to low levels when nothing was passing and it would reach quite high levels if an aircraft flew overhead or a train went by and then it would fall again. If you were charged with quantifying that noise environment in a way which could be used to say, "The noise environment for this community is this level and there is a significant effect", matters of that kind, you need an index which will deal with rising and falling sound, peaks of sound and get it into one number. Clearly, you can measure the maximum noise level when aircraft go over or when trains go by and we do that by Lmax, as it is called, and we may put the `A' in front of it to signify the A-weighting I was describing earlier. LAmax is a useful measure of the passage of vehicles, for example, but, if there is one vehicle a day or one aircraft a night, that is not as significant as 10, 20 or 100 vehicles in the period, so some means is required to take account both of sound level and of the number of times the event occurs or how long the event goes on for, and we use an index which, in full, is called `equivalent continuous sound level', which is abbreviated as `Leq' (for equivalent) and nearly always it is A-weighted, like the dB(A), and then it becomes LAeq. It is an index which crops up in almost every case when environmental noise and indeed even occupational noise is being assessed and, consequently, it comes into the firing line from people who consider that it is in some way inadequate. It helps to understand exactly what it does because some of the criticism of it is misplaced, and I will do my best now to explain what Leq does and show it can usefully be used for these time-varying environments. Slide 12 is a hypothetical example of noise varying with time.[50] This is actually artificial, I made it up, but it is sound levels bobbing along around 45 dB(A) until something happens, it could be the passage of a vehicle, it could be the switching on of a piece of plant for a time and then switching it off, and then we go back to ambient noise, if I could use that term, which frequently applies to the general goings-on acoustically in the environment, low levels interspersed by minor noise events. It is not an untypical case and the scale on the left is the dB(A) scale that I have been describing and it is going up in tens, so to the extent that the ambient gets up to around 50 and my hypothetical event gets roughly to 70 while that event is on, if it went up to 60, it would be double the loudness, but it is actually going up to nearly 70, so that moment is about four times as loud as these moments. Now, that is a classic case of needing to put a single number to a very variable noise environment, and this is how it is done. The next slide, slide 13, looks very similar, but there is one essential difference, that it is not dB(A) anymore, but the plot is identical and we have what is known as a `logarithmic scale of energy' which is what the dB(A) scale or at least the pure decibel scale is really measuring.[51] One of the reasons why the decibel scale confuses everyone is that, when I was saying that from there to there was a doubling of loudness, in energy terms you will see that these energy units have gone up tenfold. The human ear does not respond to an increase in energy at anything like the rate you would expect it to if you looked purely at energy units. If a sound level meter gave you a reading in watts instead of in decibels, you would see the number of watts per square metre go up by a factor of ten and you would say, "That's odd. It only sounded like twice", and that is one of the psychophysical effects of human hearing, that it is not as sensitive as the increase in energy would imply. The corollary of that is that where this peak went up to about four times the loudness, the energy has shot up and, if we go to the next line up, it has gone up tenfold and going to the top of the scale, it has gone up a hundredfold. Then, as in slide 14, if you put exactly the same environment on to the much more familiar linear scale, which would be the same if it was particles of pollutant or anything like that, each line is the same, so we are not talking about tenfold increases, we have a linear scale, that makes that event in the middle really show up for what it is, a huge reservoir of energy, so to speak.[52] What LAeq does is, first of all, to get into this state and average the energy and, then if we move to slide 15, going back into decibels we find that, having averaged the energy, it is a much higher result than had we just averaged the decibel levels.[53] You hear lay people who are making a case about noise environments of one kind or another talking about LAeq being an average. They sometimes think it is this kind of average and, if it were, it would be a pretty poor way of expressing this entire sequence of events because it would not give anything like the weight that this noisy moment merited, whereas the LAeq scale, because it is driven by the hidden store of energy in the high levels, comes out much higher than an actual arithmetical average. It is nothing like as bad an index as you often hear people say as dealing with environments with elements of high noise level superimposed over periods of relative quiet.

  172. CHAIRMAN: Is the green line the figure without the peak?

  Mr Thornely-Taylor: No, the green line includes the peak. The green line is the arithmetical average of all the decibel levels.

  173. CHAIRMAN: Including the peak?
  (Mr Thornely-Taylor) Including the peak, yes, my Lord. That is one of the concerns people have about the LAeq scale. The other concern—and it is a very important one—relates to its faithfulness in dealing with the frequency content of the noise. I began by explaining a bit about the A-weighting scale and the fact that the human ear is very insensitive to low frequency noise, particularly insensitive to very low frequency noise. I describe the A-weighting scale as an electronic network that goes into sound level meters to make the meter a bit more like an ear. To make things more difficult, as sounds get louder, that inequality that the ear has becomes less and once you get up to those horrendously high noise levels, like my unfortunate exposure to 124, the ear is pretty much linear in its frequency response at low frequencies and at high frequencies it responds with about the same displeasure, in that case, for the same sound pressure level, no matter what the frequency. When sound level meters were first manufactured, they came out with a minimum of three different weighting networks, A that I have been talking about, also B and C which were meant to address loudness at higher levels. You were supposed to use the B curve if you were talking about something around 70 decibels taking 1,000 hertz as the reference point and 1,000 hertz means 1,000 cycles per second and is a whistle. You were meant to use the C weighting curve when you got right up to about 120. For reasons more of convenience and practice, the A curve has come to be used at all levels of sound, so if you are measuring the noise in a recording studio at very low levels, the noise at the roadside in the 70s or 80s or the noise in a factory in the 80s or 90s the practice now is to use the dB(A) even though it is the wrong weighting network for the higher levels. It gives rise to a justifiable criticism that the A weighting curve unfairly discriminates against low frequency noise as it does at medium to high sound levels. We are going to be concerned in these proceedings with some fairly low sound levels. There are issues in many petitions about noise from the operation of underground trains and I understand, my Lords, that you will be visiting a location, I think, at the beginning of next month to listen to some underground train noise and we will see what the sound levels are and they will be around the upper 30s up to about 40. Therefore, I need to spend just a moment looking at this frequency weighting issue because it is very important. The next slide—

  174. MR ELVIN: Just before we go there, Mr Thornely-Taylor, while we have this up, this is your hypothetical example that you referred to earlier. If we were going to have a look—because you referred to it earlier—the LAmax the max would be here (Indicating)? Is that right?
  (Mr Thornely-Taylor) It would indeed. That might be a moment to explain two types of LAmax, called LAmax, S for "slow" and LAmax,F for "fast". What those two subscripts mean is that one is much more sensitive to variations than the other. Early sound level meters used to have moving needle indicators on them and if you measured a sound that was not totally steady with the meter on the fast setting, the meter needle would move fairly rapidly. It would be quite hard to note down a repeatable level for the maximum sound level so they also were fitted with something called the "slow time constant" which more or less dampened the movement of the needle. That, in fact, has an eight times longer time constant, there is dampening to the needle, a little bit of averaging goes on and the difference between fast and slow is just a smoothing of the curve. We will be looking at both fast and slow maximum sound levels very shortly. If I could go on to slide 16, this is to look a little bit closer at the important business of low frequency noise and the way we hear it and the way we measure it.[54] I was talking a short while ago about the existence of several different weighting curves and referred to the fact there is an A, a B and a C. You will even find in the literature D and E, but I will not go into those. The A-weighting curve is plotted on this scale here—it is difficult to see the colours—it is this line (Indicating). It is this sort of shape. If we use the whistle, 1,000 cycles per second, 1,000 hertz, as our reference point, the A-weighting curve down, for example, at 63 hertz and that is a rumble, quite a low rumble, the curve has actually gone up by 26 decibels. What that means is if you listened to a sound, look at the sound level on a simple sound level meter with no weighting in it and have alongside a more sophisticated meter with A-weighting in it and you measured a sound of a whistle at 30 dB, and then if you turned that off and switched on a low rumble which a jury of people would consider to be the same loudness as the whistle, the meter that was fitted with the A-weighting scale would still show 30, but the simple meter with no weighting in it, which is merely measuring the physical amplitude of the sound, would measure 56 because that 26 is the ear's inability to hear low frequency sounds with the same sensitivity that it does whistles and other high frequency sounds. There are several curves on this slide and there is an important reason for that. Perhaps the most interesting one is not the curve but the group of triangles. If you go into loudness in great detail and you study the response of numbers of people, juries of people, who answer whether they consider one noise to be the same loudness as another, you end up with a family of curves called "equal loudness curves" which has now been standardised, there is an ISO standard 226, and they actually use a unit called the "phon", which is one of the very earliest acoustical measurement units. The only point I want to make, I do not want to confuse the issue by talking about phons—we will never refer to the term again except for the next slide—the important thing is what the phon is showing you is that the whistle at 1,000 hertz if you go down to the rumble at 63, the phon is telling you that the A-weighting curve is underweighting at this level and that the true loudness is actually less than the A-weighting meter would show you. There are also other more sophisticated ways of rating noise which we may have to deal with later in the proceedings because they are used for rating noise in places like auditoria, recording studios, special places where the sound environment is critical. They approach things in a slightly different way, there are two rather similar indices, one called "NC" which stands for noise criterion, and that appears in an ISO standard for the recording industry, and there is a European-based, very similar, system "NR" called noise rating. The fundamental point is that they too adversely weight low frequencies to very much the same degree as the A-weighting curve. That is for sounds around about 30 dB(A) level. For simplicity's sake we are talking about single frequencies: whistles, hums, rumbles. If we move on to slide 17, we have gone up to double the loudness, we have gone up to 40, but the same picture emerges.[55] The only thing which is apparent is there is rather more uncertainty at the low frequency end, the different systems agree slightly less about what is of equal loudness. Again, there is no fundamental problem with the A-weighting network overdoing things at low frequency. I am not going to prolong things by showing you curves going on higher—50, 60, 70—but if I did we would then start to see the A-weighting curve falling down progressively more and the higher levels, dB(A), are justifiably criticised for not measuring low frequencies very well. Down around the 30 and 40 mark all the international systems and the basic loudness assessment show that it is about the right shape. The only thing which is important to bear in mind with dB(A) levels at low frequencies at these low sound levels—and I think this will become apparent on the site visit when we go to listen to underground train noise—is that the rule of thumb I almost began with, that 10 dB(A) is a doubling of loudness, does not hold good all the way down to very low frequencies. If we are dealing in rumbles, the change in loudness is rather more than that and we will be probably be lucky enough to hear some trains go underneath the room, we will be in at around 40 dB(A); we will hear some others go by at about 30. You can judge for yourselves whether you believe that to be a halving of loudness or a bit more, but you may consider that it is a bit more than a halving and that is one of the consequences of the A-weighting scale and one of the reasons why we would be in difficulty if we were using it at much higher levels than this.

  175. LORD BROOKE OF ALVERTHORPE: You referred to all the international systems. Are there many? Is there a common one in Europe?
  (Mr Thornely-Taylor) There are many systems for detailed evaluation of noise, my Lord, like the noise rating, the noise criterion. There is a system for certificating aircraft noise which uses yet another weighting method. I think if I were to write down all the different ways used for measuring noise I would fill an A4 sheet of paper quite quickly. When we are dealing with environmental noise and assessment of it everybody uses the LAeq scale to a greater or lesser extent. Additionally they use maximum noise levels LAmaxS and LAmaxF, and I will show you some international guidance shortly. There are also sub-indices of the LAeq that enable you to calculate it using something called SEL, which either means sound exposure level or single event level according to which standard you are using. I do not need to go there at present but I think, largely to keep my colleagues in work, we have invented more indices than any other field of endeavour. Unfortunately it remains so complex that consultants are needed to sort things out.

  176. MR ELVIN: Mr Thornely-Taylor, just to pick up Lord Brooke's question, in terms of the World Health Organisation and the advice which it gives on an international basis, what is its favoured set of indices?
  (Mr Thornely-Taylor) I will shortly show a slide in which most of the guidance is LAeq, but there is also important advice about LAmax, the maximum noise level measurement, as well.

  177. MR ELVIN: Which is one of the reasons why we are focussing on it.

  178. LORD YOUNG OF NORWOOD GREEN: Before you move on, just to get a fix on this, in terms of what is detectable by the average human ear, and that is a weighted phrase in itself, is it not, as you say with frequency we are not very good at low and we are not very good at high and these are age-related as well, but what is the sort of range we are talking about? Are we talking about an average human ear at its peak of hearing?
  (Mr Thornely-Taylor) You may have noticed a story in the press recently about a device called a Mosquito which is intended to discourage young people from congregating in shop doorways. It produces a very high frequency sound. As a very young man playing around with sound oscillators I can remember what it was like to hear 20kHz. Now most of us hear 20kHz in the form of tinnitus internally generated within our heads. As you get older something called presbiacusis comes in which is a natural reduction in the sensitivity of the ear to very high frequencies. Birdsong is a bit lower than that and fortunately it is usual to be able to continue to hear birdsong until a very advanced age, that would typically be around the 2-4kHz area—1kHz is a whistle. As you go down in frequency there is not normally an age-related effect except that disorders of the hearing can reduce low frequency sensitivity due to mechanical malfunction of the ear. Most importantly noise-induced hearing loss—damage to hearing caused by high noise levels at work, or excessive exposure to loud music—has a very specific effect. When cases come before the courts claiming noise-induced hearing loss what you look for is a dip at 4kHz; it is localised around that area. When claimants come forward alleging loss of hearing due to their employment if there is not that characteristic dip you have to look very much more closely at their hearing and the history of their exposure to noise. I do not know whether I have answered your question or not.

  179. LORD YOUNG OF NORWOOD GREEN: Just at the low frequency end, what are we talking about in terms of the average ear? What can you detect down to? What sort of frequency are we talking about?
  (Mr Thornely-Taylor) The textbooks will say 20Hz is the start of the audible range; but what happens down there is you start to confuse audible sound with vibration. If you live close to a road and heavy lorries go by they may set your windows going, they will set the room vibrating and you will perceive it more as a whole body effect than just as an audible effect. As the frequency goes down there is just a transition from perceiving a heard sound to a felt sound, and you would possibly even describe it as vibration even if it was still coming through the air and not necessarily through the ground.



42   Crossrail Ref: P4, Outline of Presentation (LINEWD-RTT01-004) Back

43   Crossrail Ref: P4, Scope of Noise and Vibration Issues (LINEWD-RTT01-005) Back

44   Crossrail Ref: P4, Basics-Noise (LINEWD-RTT01-006) Back

45   Crossrail Ref: P4, Basics-Noise (LINEWD-RTT01-007) Back

46   Crossrail Ref: P4, Basics-Noise (LINEWD-RTT01-008) Back

47   Crossrail Ref: P4, Basics-Noise (LINEWD-RTT01-009) Back

48   Crossrail Ref: P4, Scale of Decibel Levels (LINEWD-RTT01-010) Back

49   Crossrail Ref: P4, Basics-Noise (LINEWD-RTT01-011) Back

50   Crossrail Ref: P4, LAeq is no ordinary average ... (LINEWD-RTT01-012) Back

51   Crossrail Ref: P4, LAeq is no ordinary average ... (LINEWD-RTT01-013) Back

52   Crossrail Ref: P4, LAeq is no ordinary average ... (LINEWD-RTT01-014) Back

53   Crossrail Ref: P4, LAeq is no ordinary average ... (LINEWD-RTT01-015) Back

54   Crossrail Ref: P4, Low Frequency Noise-A-weighting curve 30 dB (A) Level (LINEWD-RTT01-016) Back

55   Crossrail Ref: P4, Low Frequency Noise-A-weighting curve 40 dB (A) Level (LINEWD-RTT01-017) Back


 
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