Living near a busy road, how annoying is it?

[bagzee]

You see, our house back to a busy street (Lohmans Crossing). Speaking for ourselves and most of our guests, the noise is actually not much of a problem, though, the house is built in such a way that non of the windows really face the street, which helps a lot with the noise. However, reading through all these blogs on the topic, I find people mostly discuss the 'noise' aspect of the problem, but I am curious about the pollution!? Can a relatively busy street (two lanes each direction, no traffic lights) give off enough of the bad gasses/dust or other VOC's that could actually be considered a health hazard? (and this is not a bumper-to-bumper situation ever, maybe up to 50-60 cars a minute in rush hour)

[SeanKubicek]

It's absolutely horrible for resale value. Just look at the prices for homes that back up to Mopac compared to homes that don't pick up any noise from Mopac. There's a $200k difference in Central and West Austin depending on whether you hear Mopac or not.

[G Grasshopper]

When we were looking at houses, we noticed road noise in one house that we liked, and turned it down (It was one house away from William Cannon, on the side of the house). After that, when we looked at a house, the first thing we did was walk to the back yard and listen (It was across an empty greenbelt from Slaughter). But we are people who like to sit on the deck to absorb the peace of the evening. Other people may not care about this, but we eventually declined to look at any house that was less than a block away from a big street or freeway.