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GREENSBORO — The city could become the first in North Carolina to battle road noise with tougher standards for home construction, if local leaders go ahead with new rules for the Urban Loop.

The proposal would create a buffer up to 100 feet deep on both sides of the interstate, including an already existing “scenic corridor” and a new strip of land where developers would use building techniques known to muffle road noise.

No particular technique would be required over another, but most builders would have to do something. Options proposed by the city Planning Department include building earthen berms that deflect sound waves or locating garages, other outbuildings or parking lots between the freeway and any new homes.

The proposal also could include beefed-up standards requiring all home buyers near the highway to sign a disclaimer acknowledging the loop’s proximity and its potential impact on their lives.

“They’re really kind of breaking new ground in North Carolina,” said Gregory Smith, the state Department of Transportation’s noise analyst in Raleigh. “I’m not aware of another community in North Carolina that has anything like it.”

Local governments often are reluctant to enact such noise rules, said Carol A. Lewis, who teaches transportation planning at Texas Southern University and directs the school’s transportation research center.

“The hindrance to them (local officials) is that they want the development and they want the tax money,” said Lewis, whose center prepared the Federal Highway Administration’s latest guidebook on “noise compatible” planning.

“The development is coming and the city has to say, 'We want you, the developer, to realize that there will be a roadway here, so either don’t develop in that area or develop it in a special way,” she said.

Greensboro’s push for new standards started with the City Council after an angry May 2008 public meeting that attracted several hundred suburban neighbors of the loop’s southwestern section, which had opened that winter.

Speaker after speaker denounced the incessant din of speeding traffic, demanding government somehow restore the area’s lost tranquility.

“Council members asked us to look into establishing local regulations to help minimize noise impacts,” city Planning Director Dick Hails said.

The new regulations would offer no immediate help to residents of neighborhoods already built along either the existing loop or its future route.

If adopted, they would apply only to projects begun next to the loop after the new standards take effect.

The rules would shield all residential development on lots larger than one acre, from single-family houses to condominiums and apartments. Other protected uses would include schools and places of worship.

The plan is aimed at compensating for the loop’s dearth of publicly funded noise walls. Although they don’t always work wonders, such walls generally are perceived as the gold standard against highway noise.

But relatively few neighborhoods qualify for noise walls on the current or future loop, because most were built after the 43-mile-long route was formally registered with Guilford County in 1996.

Federal and state governments will only build protective walls for homes already in place before an “official corridor map” is registered.

“Anything that received a building permit after that date, we cannot consider for noise abatement,” says DOT’s Smith.

Greensboro’s proposed rules would not require developers to build their own noise walls, although that would be an option. The council specifically told planners not to mandate private walls, Hails said.

In addition, the council wanted to steer clear of another tool likely to slash noise complaints — simply banning residential development beside the loop.

The council felt that would be too broad-based and complicated, Hails said: “It would affect hundreds of properties in northern Greensboro, for example, that already are residentially zoned.”

So planners came up with a noise-impact zone 50 feet deep, directly behind the scenic corridor that is already in place on both sides of the current and future loop.

Developers could build non-residential buildings inside this new noise zone, unlike the scenic buffer setback that must remain in its natural state.

But any use of land in the protective zone would include noise-deadening techniques, which could be so basic as putting the extra space of a parking lot between the loop and the first dwelling.

Other options include berms at least 6 feet high, walls of various material, adding a double row of evergreen trees, filling the space with such sound-blocking structures as a clubhouse or garages, and limiting residential doors and windows on the highway side.

Builders also would get credit if their development is on land 15 feet or more lower than the road, under the theory that highway noise would be less troublesome for a neighborhood that far below grade.

A potential shortcoming is the proposal’s unscientific approach; some techniques work better than others in specific situations, but the proposal makes no such distinction.

“We told the council from the get-go that we were not scientists, but we were going to rely on the available information,” Hails said.

The proposal’s flexibility is a necessity, said Marlene Sanford, president of the Triad Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition.

Builders and developers are physically limited in what they can do by a particular property’s size, shape, terrain and orientation to the loop, she said.

“You won’t be able to do every single lot the same way,” said Sanford, part of a review panel that vetted the proposal.

The plan goes to the City Council for consideration in late July, but it had a less-than-stellar debut before the city Planning Board two weeks ago.

The advisory board did not like the 50 feet of additional buffer, thinking it too much burden for too little gain.

“The majority of our board did not think another 50 feet would make that much difference” in noise reduction, said Michael Fox, a local lawyer who is chairman of the advisory panel.

Instead, board members suggested putting additional landscaping or berms within the scenic corridor. They liked the planning department’s proposal in one area: Suggesting the city require written notice to future home buyers of the new interstate highway’s proximity to their house.

“It would be a separate document that clearly states the loop’s location,” board member Joel Landau said. “That’s something that works to everybody’s benefit.”

Meanwhile, DOT’s Smith is encouraged that Greensboro seems poised for action on an issue so easy to overlook until it’s too late.

“What they’re trying to do certainly is not the end-all,” Smith said, “but I think they’re moving in the right direction.”

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com