Greece, as well as other developed countries, is facing the growing problem of road traffic noise. It stands for a severe problem in the urban areas of the country, including the city of Larissa. The root cause is the huge increase in traffic volume and the lack of adequate urban infrastructure planning. Estimation of the level of road traffic noise is usually conducted using acoustic meters. It is widely accepted that most of the cities’ population is exposed to high noise levels due to controversial traffic capacity. Moreover, high noise levels are strongly related to phycological and neurological diseases. Thus, it is of utmost importance, the road noise levels to be lower than dictated by relevant specification limits. To develop better noise-environment policies, relative research should focus on the measurement of in-situ noise levels, so as appropriate for each case corrective measures to be taken. The present paper examines the noise levels of a center road of the 5th Greek city, in terms of population, compared to worldwide adopted noise specification limits. The clear aim stands for finding the percentage of road noise that exceeds commonly accepted threshold values, namely limit values of European Union and World Health Organization. The results of this research strongly indicate that measured noise values override upper limit values in a certain extent.
The objective of this research is to develop a mathematical model to predict the road traffic noise level at the bus stop, to assess the level of noise that users of these urban facilities are exposed daily. To help assess the exposure and the environmental impact, sound mapping will
be performed using the IMMI software. In the model, the calculation of direct paths and specular reflections and diffuse was adopted. The study was applied in three sections in the city of Maringá, Brazil. At each point, the user was simulated standing and sitting. The sound source
was positioned on the axis of each strip, every five meters. In total, 5124 readings of source positions were evaluated in 84 measured points. For the validation, the Anderson-Kurze, Kang, Yang and Zhang, Bistafa and Naish model were applied, and then the t-Student test were applied. The results
showed a correspondence between the developed model, the data of the measurements and the reference models in the range of 25 Hz to 10000 Hz, there was a greater variance between the models applied in the high frequencies. It is concluded that the model was able to estimate the sound level
of the stretches evaluated.
This chapter examines the São Paulo Municipal Chamber, focusing on three noise debates in São Paulo, the first two of which involve noise ordinances created in the 1990s, and enforced by the PSIU. The first debate revolves around the Evangelical lawmakers’ attempts to exclude, minimize, or hinder the impact of the noise ordinance on religious services. The second debate focuses on an ordinance that requires bars without acoustic insulation to close at 1:00 a.m.: a demand that faced strong opposition from nightlife businesses. The third debate circles back to the beginning of this article. I describe the recent attempt of a group of acoustic engineers to lobby the city administration for the systematic mapping of traffic noise. For the sound specialists, it is only with such an acoustic map that the municipal government can plan a truly sustainable city.
The paper presents an analysis of the noise recorded by the two road traffic noise-monitoring stations. The stations were located in Kielce, Poland, at the road No. 74: on the outskirts of the city and near the center. Based on the experimentally recorded data, an equivalent sound level and acoustic pressure were determined for three sub-intervals of the day: nights, days and evenings. The conducted analyses showed that the average annual values (depending only on the time sub-intervals) of the median do not differ significantly between stations. A similar conclusion can be drawn based on simulations of the median and the C90 percentile of the sound pressure . However, the maximum relative differences in the C99 percentile of the acoustic pressure between stations are around 13%. The maximum relative differences in median pressure between stations are around 15% (for the time sub-interval nights).
Rapid and intrusive spatial adjustments in common spaces are increasingly questioned by the awareness of citizens demanding higher quality standards. This study aims to understand the use of common space by identifying how the sound environment affects the functions of space and the interaction with other environmental and spatial variables. Is there a certain sound environment required or that should be avoided when designing a space for a specific activity? In situ evaluations with regular users were collected in nine common spaces in Gothenburg, Sweden, conducting sound recordings and questionnaires. Site selection responded to the purpose of the analysed places, the noise level (LAeq) of the city road traffic noise map, and the number of activities suggested by the city sociotope maps. The analyses revealed that certain activities could be identified from LAeq values. Discriminant functions with respect to sound levels primarily identified a tranquil/restorative vibrant dimension, where the highest noise levels tend to be at the most vibrant end. Other results showed that a considerable variability of overall and visual quality judgements came from the variability in sites. These quality assessments were highly correlated, allowing both to be analysed as a single attribute. The variability in sound quality was much lower. Notable is the difference between recorded and perceived loudness. In addition, poor sound quality judgement does not seem to correlate with the perception of mechanical sources as the main source of noise.
A noise monitoring campaign has been performed in an urban park of Milan (Italy) called Parco Nord. The area of study is a large peri-urban park in the northern part of the city, characterized by wooded land rich in biodiversity and exposed to different sources and degrees of anthropogenic disturbances, such as road traffic noise and artificial light. The acoustic environment is rather complex due to the contemporary presence of different noise sources, leading to the difficult task of discriminating them in audio data. Due to these multifactorial characteristics, we evaluated different eco-acoustic indices in the attempt to derive a methodology to evaluate the potential of sound ecology indicators to discriminate the different types of sounds present in medium-large urban parks. Time series of about two-week recordings have been transformed into eco-acoustics indices and statistically analysed. The results show a redistribution of recordings into each cluster associated with different sound components and different period of the day. This allowed the identification of different degree of biophonic and/or anthropogenic activities throughout the day.
Traffic noise is presently considered one of the main pollutants in urban and suburban areas. Several recent technological advances have allowed a step forward in the dynamic computation of road-traffic noise levels by means of a Wireless Acoustic Sensor Network (WASN) through the collection of measurements in real-operation environments. In the framework of the LIFE DYNAMAP project, two WASNs have been deployed in two pilot areas: one in the city of Milan, as an urban environment, and another around the city of Rome in a suburban location. For a correct evaluation of the noise level generated by road infrastructures, all Anomalous Noise Events (ANE) unrelated to regular road-traffic noise (e.g., sirens, horns, speech, etc.) should be removed before updating corresponding noise maps. This work presents the production and analysis of a real-operation environmental audio database collected through the 19-node WASN of a suburban area. A total of 156 h and 20 min of labeled audio data has been obtained differentiating among road-traffic noise and ANEs (classified in 16 subcategories). After delimiting their boundaries manually, the acoustic salience of the ANE samples is automatically computed as a contextual Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) together with its impact on the A-weighted equivalent level ( Δ L A e q ). The analysis of the real-operation WASN-based environmental database is evaluated with these metrics, and we conclude that the 19 locations of the network present substantial differences in the occurrences of the subcategories of ANE, with a clear predominance of the noise of sirens, trains, and thunder.
Sustainable transportation is an essential part of a sustainable city; however, modern transportation systems with internal-combustion engines emits unacceptably high level of air-pollutants and noise. It is recognized widely that road-traffic noise has negative health impacts (such as annoyance and sleep disturbance) on exposed population in highly-populated cities. These harmful effects should be removed or at least reduced to guarantee the sustainability of modern cities. The estimation of pollutant levels at a specific location and the extent of the damage is therefore important for policy makers. This study presents a procedure to determine the levels of road-traffic noise at both day and night, and an assessment of the adverse health effects across Gwangju Metropolitan City (GMC), Republic of Korea (ROK). Road-traffic noise maps in 2-D and 3-D were generated, in order to find spatial distribution of noise levels across the city and noise level at the façade of a building-floor, respectively. The adoption of existing assessment models for the highly-annoyed (%HA) and highly-sleep-disturbed (%HSD) leads to building-based estimation of the affected population and spatial distribution of the road networks of the city. Very high noise levels were found to exist along major roads in the day and at night, with little difference between them. As a result, approximately 10% and 5% of the total population (n = 1,471,944) were estimated to experience high-level annoyance and sleep disturbance, respectively.
Road Noise Levels in Urban Environment Compared to Specification Limits. The Case of the City of Larissa, Greece