Imbeciles doing traffic education campaigns should focus on the bigger and easier to fight health problems of traffic:
http://www.transportenvironment.org/press/50000-heart-deaths-year-caused-traffic-noise
This conservative estimate in the link above doubles the number of deaths by mechanical accidents, and that is just
heart disease. And other studies come to the conclusion that it is not just old people who die by this effect. In any case,
traffic noise makes life a lot worse than it could be.
With the efforts on automotive "sound design", even new family cars are made to sound "sonorous" and "impressive",
for example the target for diesel cars is to sound like an attacking bigger animal, to which we can't get used to in our
subconscious reactions.
In any case, frequencies transmitting the most power in car noise have gone down, which means you can't insulate
your house/sleeping room against that kind of noise, due to the mechanics of sound propagation in continuous media.
To see the real effect of this, just compare an everyday stock 90s petrol car like a small Volkswagen Golf and a new
stock diesel family car going up an inclined small inner historic city road - the old one is very silent, the new diesel
makes bass noise like in a club, in the streets and in the houses.
While lower frequencies mostly don't signal an immediate danger to our subconscious and therefore more bearable,
they are genetically imprinted to still represent a danger and therefore increase anxiety/excitation levels during night
and day.