I won't try to convince you that helicopter noise is a major global problem. It is not bigger than poverty, not bigger than crime or disease, not bigger than nuclear war and not bigger than pandemic risk. It is an urban, developed-world, noise-sensitive-guy problem.
So it is my problem, and I hate it, and I am going to write about it.
In New York City, where I may or may not live, there are more than 100 helicopter flights per day, not counting the ones that take off from New Jersey. A helicopter engine produces 87 decibels of sound at a typical height of 500 feet (or about 70 at 1000 feet), which means that every time one passes overhead it is kind of like having a movie theater visit your apartment for a few moments.
For most people this is a mild inconvenience (although for me it is something close to an incitement to violence), but I think it's worth noting that in a city with 30,000 people per square mile, every helicopter ride mildly inconveniences thousands of people.
And how much does it cost a family of pleasant tourists from Paducah to wake babies and set dogs barking everywhere from Jersey City to Jackson Heights? Between $200 and $300 per person, evidently. Blade offers an air taxi service to JFK for about $200. I wasn't able to find good information on how much it costs to fly from a private heliport on Park Avenue to one's weekend house in Southampton, but you can bet it's probably more expensive.
These low prices constitute what's known to Econ 101 students as "failing to internalize the externality": helicopters impose a cost on the public, but they don't pay that cost themselves — no one does.
The true cost of a helicopter ride: A back-of-the-envelope calculation
In contemporary economics, it's common to value putatively unquantifiable goods or events by asking people how much they would pay to get or avoid them. This allows us to estimate the "welfare cost" of helicopter noise — how much worse off are people, in dollar terms, for suffering through it? Another way of thinking this is in terms of willingness to pay — what people's financial behavior reveals about the importance of things like, for instance, noise.
Though not everybody is as close as I am to being driven insane by helicopters, people do care. This figures: if you had other options, would you buy or rent a home in the flight path to an airport? Noise affects demand for housing that's exposed to high levels of it, and a few good-quality studies have attempted to quantify just how much:
This study finds that aircraft noise reduces apartment rents by 0.5% per additional decibel
This one suggests a fall in home prices of about 1.7% per additional decibel
This study suggests a fall in home prices of about 1% per additional decibel
The "per decibel" in these studies refers to the noise level within a given time interval, so we can also use it with reference to averages. Based on these studies, suppose that each additional decibel reduces property values by roughly 1%.
Let's assume that indoors, the ambient noise level once you take into account things like fans, conversations, and televisions averages about 20 decibels. This suggests that each minute of helicopter noise increases the average noise level by about 0.0001 decibels. See this footnote for more details.1
The average home in New York costs about $800k, so each additional minute of helicopter noise shaves about 1 dollar in value off the average home.2
How much does this add up to in aggregate? It seems like the average helicopter flight in New York lasts about 20 minutes. Suppose the helicopter is only within earshot of houses for about 15 minutes. Let's make a pretty big simplifying assumption, based on the fact that sound intensity decreases by an inverse square law: suppose that helicopter noise is only annoying to those within a hundred-foot radius ot the spot directly under the helicopter. That's about ten households.3
That means that the average helicopter flight reduces property values, in aggregate, by about $1504, so 30,000 flights per year works out to about $4.5 million in lost value.
The price is too damn low
Using this figure as a (very) rough estimate of the degree to which people don't like noise, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that helicopter flights are dramatically underpriced.
As far as I can tell, helicopter flights aren't subject to much in the way of taxation beyond state and local taxes summing to about 9%, and a heliport fee often in the neighborhood of $40. But a full accounting of the wellbeing costs of these overflights suggests that something close to a 50% increase in price is called for. Unfortunately, the Econ 101 solution to this problem — for government to tax the noisemakers and compensate the noise-affected — doesn't work well, since it's hard to identify exactly who's affected, and since the money wouldn't really help them solve the problem anyway, and since the tax would probably just end up paying for subway repairs.
An optimal solution to this problem would be to allow New York citizens to sue helicopter companies for producing excessive noise, thus making direct compensation to those affected more practical and raising the expected cost of a helicopter ride, incentivizing companies to avoid populated areas, and discouraging unnecessary flights. Unfortunately, a bill allowing exactly that was just vetoed by Governor Hochul.
There's still some hope: a bill before the State Assembly proposes, for helicopters, both a carbon tax and a noise tax adding up to "an additional fifty dollar per seat ticket tax or two hundred dollar per flight tax whichever is greater for any non-essential helicopter flights conducted using a helicopter which produces more than 34 thirty decibels while in operation." This, indeed, is in the ballpark of what my back-of-the-envelope would recommend.
It's not ideal, but it's a good start, since the International Air Transport Association estimates that demand elasticities for short-haul flights are in the neighborhood of 1.5, suggesting that a 50% increase in cost would result in a 75% drop in demand. That would mean a drop from 100 flights per day to 25. That sounds good as hell to me.
As the song goes, there are 525,600 minutes in a year, so shifting one of those minutes from 20 to 80 decibels raises the average by about 60/525,600 = ~0.0001
$800k * 0.0001 decibels * 1% reduction per decibel = 80 cents, to be precise, which we're not being
A 100-foot radius works out to 30,000 square feet, which is about 1/1000 of a square mile, or 30 people at NYC densities. At 2.5 people per household, that's twelve-ish households
1 dollar per minute * 15 minutes * ten households