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

The pandemic of COVID-19 has transformed the way people live and work, and their willingness to pay for quietness. Using the outbreak of COVID-19 in Singapore as a quasi- natural experiment, we investigate tenants’ changing responses to road traffic noise in the rental housing market, using 46,980 transaction records between 2006 and 2022. By constructing threshold zones by distance to main roads, we first empirically identify treatment vs. control groups in exposure to traffic noise. Second, we use difference-in-differences estimation to show that road traffic noise decreases housing rents by 3.8% in 2020 immediately after the pandemic and rockets to 12.7% in the subsequent year—equivalent to 186.7 US dollars per month. Our results are robust to parallel trend analysis, permutation placebo tests, and tests using alternative distance thresholds or distance to the nearest main road. Third, we 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 our 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. Our results have policy implications for nations beyond Singapore 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.