The Price of Quietness: How a Pandemic Affects City Dwellers’ Response to Road Traffic Noise

Using the outbreak of COVID-19 in Singapore as a quasi-natural experiment, the authors investigate tenants’ changing responses to road traffic noise in the rental housing market, using 46,980 transaction records between 2006 and 2022. Their difference-in-differences estimates show that road traffic noise decreases housing rents by 3.8% immediately after the pandemic outbreak and further declines by 12.7% in the subsequent year—equivalent to 186.7 US dollars per month. The results are robust to parallel trend analysis, permutation placebo tests, and tests using alternative distance thresholds or distance to the nearest main road. Then, the authors adopt a machine learning text analysis of 10,425 rental housing advertisements, showing that tenants’ preference for quietness increases by approximately 10% from 2019 into 2020. The new work-from-home business model and rising traffic from delivery services can explain for this pattern. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper using a large volume of transaction records to quantify city dwellers’ willingness to pay for quietness in the COVID-19 context. The results have policy implications for other nations and post-pandemic era on the interaction among urban planning, transport networks, and human settlements, and shed light on the pathway to achieve sustainable development goals.

• Record URL:
  • https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2023.104882
• Record URL:
  • http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210670723004936
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/22106707
• Supplemental Notes:
  • © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Abstract reprinted with permission of Elsevier.
• Authors:
  • Wang, Yao-pei
  • 0000-0002-6729-7780
  • Tu, Yong
  • 0000-0002-4581-3676
  • Fan, Yi
  • 0000-0001-6530-8282
• Publication Date: 2023-12

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: References;
• Pagination: 104882
• Serial:
  • Sustainable Cities and Society
  • Volume: 99
  • Issue Number: 0
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 2210-6707
  • Serial URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/22106707?sdc=2

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Before and after studies; COVID-19; Data mining; Rent; Tenants; Traffic noise
• Geographic Terms: Singapore
• Subject Areas: Environment; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01893979
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Sep 22 2023 9:08AM