I am considering moving to a house that’s on a reasonably busy 2-lane road (major arterial road for a subdivision, cars generally going 30-40mph). Interested in hearing experiences of others who’ve lived on busy roads. Did you hate it? Or didn’t bother you and got used to it quickly?
I figure we wouldn’t use our front yard much, but I don’t use our front yard much now either. The backyard of this house is really great, though you can hear a little bit of traffic out there as well. The front door of the house is probably 35 feet from the road.
Ours used to be a quiet street, but since they started replacement work for the bridge and traffic got slowed to a crawl on the main feeder, people now cut through our neighborhood and then jam themselves into the waiting line of cars further down. They treat this street as their personal freeway. Despite speed bumps (it’s a bicycle boulevard), they still manage to get up quite a head of steam. Noisy, busy and annoying. Hate it, and can’t wait for the bridge to be finished late next year.
We moved to a house on a similar type of road, a 40 mph, 2-lane neighborhood artery, about 10 years ago. We were a little concerned about it, but our house is set back from the road enough, and our backyard is large enough, that it’s not a problem. Also, we made a point before we bought of being there right at the height of rush hour to see how bad the road got. Some of the commuter roads in that area jam up with bumper-to-bumper, 5 mph traffic during the worst of it, but our road never gets too busy at all.
35 feet from your door to the road sounds a little close for my liking though. It’s not on the outside of a bend in the road, is it? We live on the inside of a bend in the road and people come flying around the blind spot doing easily 10 or more over the speed limit. Have to be very eyes-open crossing the road.
One time someone lost control on the curve and took out signs, mailboxes and an electric utility pole. Her vehicle was covered in live wires-- the first responders waited around for 45 minutes until the electric company gave the word the power was out. (I don;t know how bad-off the driver was but she appeared conscious when they took her away on a stretcher). That was a few years after we had moved there-- one of the neighbors said “yep, that pole gets taken out once about every 5-10 years. Last time was 6 years ago.” I guess the moral of that story is make sure if it is on a bend of a busy road, make sure it’s at least the inside of the bend
We’re on a reasonably busy two-lane road which connects two very busy four-lane roads. It’s only really noisy when we have the windows open and a bus goes by but that’s the price to pay for convenient bus service.
There used to be the occasional Fast ‘n’ Furious wannabe treating the hill as a slalom course but one of those idiots pulling a hit 'n 'run with an oncoming car seems to have put a stop to that.
This. It really does feel like this…and our road didn’t LOOK like it was a main thoroughfare for semis but it definitely is.
I rent an apartment next to a busy road, about the same 35 feet back, with a hedge in front. Absolutely awful for the trucks, not as much the cars, but still bad. The empty trucks are actually the worst because they’re leaving early in the morning to get where they need to go. Every little bump they go over rattles some loose piece of equipment in the back and WHAM BAM WHAM WHAM SLAM. It’s extremely loud and wakes you the way a gunshot or explosion would in the sense that it’s not sustained noise or a noise that gradually builds that you can get used to but something quick and jarring. For half a year or more I couldn’t get used to it and would get woken up. I had a friend over who lives in a rural area and he could not sleep a wink at night from the noise. Then there’s all the cars that roar by speeding (much worse at night since there is nobody to slow them down), the motorcycles, the cars with the music way up, and the cars riding around on flat tires (?? yeah some guy continually has a flat tire…). And we have a four-lane-to-two-lane (two lanes each direction turning into one lane each direction) merge right next to our house and naturally all the idiots in the world never see it coming, almost run into the car in the lane next to them, and HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK right in front of our house. The road doesn’t have enough trees and bushes next to it and therefore turns into an echo-chamber as all the sounds bounce off the houses lining the street. AND we have a bus stop right at the end of our walk. We’ll be on the opposite side of the house from the road and still hear “…next stop mount ve…” from inside the bus if we have a window open. :eek:
In short, you could not pay me a million bucks to buy a house next to a busy road. Well, maybe you could, but I’d just sell the house immediately and keep the change.
If traffic noises are a problem for you and prevent you from sleeping, it can be bad. I live in an apartment on a busy 4-lane city street with traffic whizzing by at all hours. Fortunately I like city noise and it’s not a big issue for me, but I know some people couldn’t take it. I had one friend who visited me and was completely overwhelmed by the city noise and bustle.
The biggest issue I have is that there is a hospital only 3 blocks away. You never quite get used to ambulances rushing by with sirens blaring.
Similar to solost’s experience with the power pole, I used to live right on an intersection of two fairly busy arterials and although the traffic noise didn’t bother me there was usually a bad accident in the middle of the night every few weeks. Also for whatever reason the cops seemed to pull people over for DUI’s a lot at the intersection so we’d get people doing the whole stand on one leg routine right in front of our house regularly. Free entertainment, I guess.
(Actually now that I think about it, one other major drawback was that the landlord pretty much refused to fix anything because the city kept talking about widening one of the roads and trying to fix the intersection which would probably mean eminent-domaining the house. AFAIK they still haven’t though.)
My neighborhood is sandwiched between two major roads, and there is only one street that goes all the way through: my street. It also runs parallel to another major road. However, we’re near the top of a pretty high hill, on a particularly steep part, and there’s a STOP sign on the corner just past our house. The traffic is not zooming by, it’s a residential street, but there’s an awful lot of screeching at the STOP sign (usually followed by a lot of peeling out), as well as a lot of vehicles going past.
I would not recommend moving there, if you are sensitive to noise. I have previously lived on a noisy street, and it is not pleasant. A lot of the time I had the radio on to block out of the noise, and that did not help much, as a lot of the commercials on the radio got on my nerves, as well. I didn’t mind looking out at the traffic, and could easily close the curtains, but it was the noise from the traffic that bothered me.
For my parents’ friend who used to live on a similar road, the noise wasn’t the problem - getting out of their driveway was. And you sure didn’t want to have to back out.
For the people across the street from them, since the road curved by them, it was more the fact that at least five people I can think of died in their front yard in a variety of accidents. So yeah. That.
It is absolutely horrible. I lived for 8 months in an apartment on a busy road; it was the main artery from the airport into the city. All the traffic coming from that direction went past my building. It was in town, not on the highway. It was only a 2 lane street, but the traffic never ended, and much of the traffic, a great deal, was buses and trucks. It was constant, continuous. It went on day and night, 24/7. If you wake up at 3 in the morning, it is still going on. When you have the weekend off, you can’t sleep late in the morning because as soon as you wake up, you hear traffic. In the summer, you can’t open your windows because of the traffic noise. It drove me crazy, and even now, some 8 years later, just thinking about it and writing this, I feel totally stressed.
You have to keep the TV or stereo or radio on ALL the time just to block it out.
Don’t do it. It is absolutely hellish.
Your front door is 35 feet away from the road? My building was the second building away from the road, on a side street, and the traffic was still just awful, one reason being it was so constant, day and night every single day.
I used to live near a major airport. During the day, with planes taking off every 90 seconds, you had to stop conversations until they passed, but at night, you could sleep right through them.
Of course, since the airport stopped flights at 10PM, that could be the reason.
