Ahmedabad: Step out of your door anywhere in Ahmedabad — Navrangpura, Naroda, Nikol, or Naranpura — and you will be assailed by a noise wave of 70 decibels or more. That noise level is roughly equivalent to what you hear from an air conditioning unit at close range.Unlike an air conditioner, the city’s din can’t be switched off — it sweeps through you all day, every day.A study published in the Oxford journal ‘Transportation Safety and Environment’ provides hard numbers showing that Ahmedabad is chronically loud. Amdavadis have long felt that in their bones, and now the study vindicates their feeling.A large portion of the city — 76.7%, home to nearly 77 lakh people — is trapped in a constant 70 decibels (dB) sound trap. To put that in perspective, the Netherlands does not permit new housing construction once noise crosses the 50 dB limit.Ahmedabad’s everyday baseline is 20 dB higher than that. The quietest pocket the researchers recorded was 40.6 dB. The loudest hit 82.3 dB. Less than 1% of the city’s land area registers a noise level that could be called healthy.Researchers Akshay Vinaychandra Vora and Rupesh Vasani from Gujarat Technological University (GTU) spent months on the city’s roads — covering 400km — recording sound levels at 633 locations across 30 routes.They took with them precision-calibrated Lutron SL-4001 sound meters and GPS units and registered readings at ear level (1.5 metres) during peak hours, from 9am to 8pm on weekdays.Vora and Vasani found that residents of Kalupur, Gomtipur, and the older eastern quarters live with narrower lanes that trap and bounce sound. Moreover, the researchers noted the heavy freight traffic grinding through markets, and the compounded roar from Kalupur Railway Station and the city airport.West Ahmedabad, which has wider roads, lower buildings, and less freight, is quieter.Using a noise-weighted traffic formula, the study found that two-wheelers — scooters and motorcycles — account for over 52% of all traffic noise in the city, despite their size. A scooter’s noise impact score of 2.74 comes close to a heavy truck’s 3.00.The researchers also built a formula that can predict how loud any street will be, finding that every extra floor added to a building amplifies street noise for everyone around it.The health consequences are no longer theoretical. Sustained noise at these levels raises pulse rates, elevates blood pressure, spikes stress hormones, and impairs work performance.The study points to clear fixes: noise buffer zones between arterial roads and homes, mandatory road-to-building setbacks in new construction, physical sound barriers along hotspots like the Ellis Bridge–Kalupur stretch, and tighter enforcement of silencer standards on two-wheelers.