Noise Levels in Pee Dee, NC | Find Quiet Neighborhoods With Our Sound Map
43 dBA
Average noise across Pee Dee
Quiet suburban street at night
19
Residents above the EPA 55 dBA threshold
4% of Pee Dee residents
77 dBA
Loudest residential point
City bus interior
This map shows modeled outdoor noise across Pee Dee at 100-meter resolution, combining road, aviation, and rail sources. Green areas measure below 45 dBA. Orange and red exceed the EPA's 55 dBA outdoor threshold linked to long-term health effects. Use the layer toggles to view each source on its own or all together.
Overall
Road
Rail
Aviation
Click the map to explore
35 dBa55 dBa (EPA limit)90+ dBa
3545557090
Quietest (dBA)Loudest
Colorblind friendlyoff
What the numbers sound like
30 dBAWhisper
40 dBASoft rainfall
45 dBAQuiet suburban street at night
50 dBAQuiet office
55 dBAEPA outdoor threshold: light traffic 100 ft away
60 dBANormal conversation an arm's length away
65 dBABusy restaurant
70 dBAHighway traffic 50 ft away
80 dBACity bus interior
Population Above the EPA Outdoor Threshold
The EPA's 55 dBA outdoor reference level is a common benchmark for residential noise exposure, especially for activity interference, annoyance, and long-term community noise concerns. About 19 Pee Dee residents, or 4.0%, live above that level. By land area, 8.3% of Pee Dee is above 55 dBA.
Southern Pee Dee sounds about 0% louder than Northern Pee Dee to the human ear, a 0.0 dBA gap. Every 10 dBA roughly doubles perceived loudness. Within any of these directions, two homes a quarter mile apart can still differ by 10 or more dBA depending on how close they sit to a major highway.
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Loudest Road Corridors
The model evaluates every road in Pee Dee using federal traffic counts, posted speeds, heavy-truck ratios, and pavement type. The source level shown is the modeled noise at the road centerline, where it is loudest. Noise drops with distance, faster in vegetated areas and slower over open pavement.
RoadTypeAvg. source dBAPeak source dBA
US-74Freeway69.972
US-74 -busPrincipal arterial64.064
Nc-24Minor arterial59.059
SR-1745Minor collector57.057
SR-1748Minor collector56.657
How far back from US-74 do you need to be?
US-74 produces an estimated 72 dBA at its loudest centerline points. Noise drops logarithmically with distance, with the exact rate depending on what's between you and the road. Tree cover, walls, terrain, and pavement type all matter. At roughly a quarter mile back, traffic fades into the noise level of a soft rainfall.
At source
72 dBA
City bus interior
165 ft
58 dBA
Normal conversation an arm’s length away
330 ft
50 dBA
Quiet office
660 ft
41 dBA
Quiet suburban street at night
¼ mile
35 dBA
Soft rainfall
½ mile
35 dBA
Soft rainfall
Calculated from the model's calibrated attenuation formula. About 72% of Pee Dee sits under tree canopy (much heavier than most cities) and roughly 0% is impervious surface like pavement and rooftops. Both are folded into the per-place decay rate above. Heavier canopy pulls noise down faster with distance; impervious surfaces slow the drop.
Rail Noise
Active freight rail runs through parts of Pee Dee. For most blocks the rail-only contribution is small. Combined road-plus-rail noise rarely exceeds road noise on its own. The exceptions are the handful of blocks within roughly a quarter mile of the right-of-way during pass-through hours.
Use the Rail toggle on the map above to isolate rail's contribution from road and aviation.
How Noise Is Distributed Across Pee Dee
The bar chart below shows the share of Pee Dee residents in each noise band. About 79% of residents live below the EPA's 55 dBA threshold, and roughly 1% live in blocks above 60 dBA. Long-term exposure in that range is linked to elevated stress hormones and cardiovascular risk.
How Pee Dee Compares
Pee Dee sits at the louder end of the spectrum. Below: how Pee Dee's average outdoor noise and share of residents above the EPA threshold compare with Covington, Ledbetter, Wade Mills, and Mangum.
Average noise level (dBA)
Pee Dee's 42.6 dBA pop-weighted average is at the louder end of the spectrum. North Carolina as a whole averages 49.7 dBA and the U.S. averages 52.0 dBA. Both are lower than Pee Dee because most of either area is rural land away from major roads.
Share of residents above 55 dBA
About 4.0% of Pee Dee residents live in blocks where outdoor levels exceed the EPA's 55 dBA threshold. That's more than any of its peer group. Measured by land area instead, 8.3% of Pee Dee's footprint sits above 55 dBA, against a North Carolina average of 22.6% and a national average of 28.1%.
What This Means if You're Moving to Pee Dee
Distance from highways matters more than the neighborhood name. Two homes in the same zip code can differ by 20 dBA if one sits 100 meters from US-74 and the other 500 meters away. The model captures this at 100-meter resolution, so noise exposure changes block by block.
Tree canopy can help reduce modeled noise exposure. Roughly 72% of Pee Dee is under tree cover (much heavier than most cities), and the dominant land cover is deciduous forest. Both are measured from federal USDA Forest Service and USGS satellite imagery at 30-meter resolution. Streets with 60% or higher canopy show 3 to 5 dBA lower noise than comparable streets with bare ground or pavement, which is why the per-place decay rate above already accounts for it.
Sources & Methodology
The BestNeighborhood noise model is calibrated against nearly one million federal ground-truth measurements across four states. Road noise is computed from segment-level federal traffic data and propagated outward using physics-based acoustic decay, with attenuation rates that depend on the surrounding land cover.
All inputs are published federal datasets. Block-level noise is computed by combining road, rail, and aviation sound sources in the energy domain, the same physics used in professional environmental noise assessments. Read the full methodology.
