scholarly journals Road Noise Levels in Urban Environment Compared to Specification Limits. The Case of the City of Larissa, Greece

Author(s):  
Emmanouil A. Papadimitriou ◽  
Grigorios P. Papageorgiou ◽  
Nikolaos Alamanis ◽  
Theodosia-Niki Diakosavva

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.

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 2947 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taeho Park ◽  
Minho Kim ◽  
Chaemi Jang ◽  
Taeryang Choung ◽  
Kyung-A Sim ◽  
...  

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.


Noise Mapping ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerónimo Vida Manzano ◽  
José Antonio Almagro Pastor ◽  
Rafael García Quesada ◽  
Francesco Aletta ◽  
Tin Oberman ◽  
...  

Abstract Exceptional circumstances in the city of Granada due to the COVID-19 lockdown have provided the opportunity to characterise the impact of humans on its urban acoustic climate. Traditional environmental noise management and urban sound planning usually take into account noise sources in the city, such as industrial activities or road traffic noise, in model estimations, as well as in empirical research. But trying to isolate human impact by itself, human activity including social activity, walking, talking or just going around the city, has always been a difficult or even impossible task. The COVID-19 lockdown measures have provided the opportunity to study urban climate as never before, affected just by natural or animal noise sources. Previous soundscape research at some iconic sites in the city of Granada carried out in 2019 before the lockdown and a special measuring campaign carried out at the same locations during the lockdown in 2020 offered valuable information on sound levels and local characteristics in order to carry out this comparison. Results show a great change in environmental noise levels that is interesting not only because of its magnitude, but also for its implications, especially at those sites where social human activity was an identifying characteristic. Natural or animal sounds became surprisingly evident at some study sites, especially where road traffic noise dramatically decreased, leading to significantly lower background noise levels. Important spectral changes are observed before and during the lockdown, suggesting a shift from anthropic to animal sources in the acoustic environment.


Author(s):  
Herni Halim ◽  
◽  
Nur Fatin Najiyah Hamid ◽  
Mohamad Firdaus Mahamad Yusob ◽  
Nur Atiqah Mohamad Nor ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
pp. 107412
Author(s):  
Ines Bouzid ◽  
Ahmed Derbel ◽  
Boubaker Elleuch

2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antônio Sérgio Melo Barbosa ◽  
Maria Regina Alves Cardoso

Coatings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabete Freitas ◽  
Lígia Silva ◽  
Cedric Vuye

Road pavement develops distresses over time, which increase tyre/road noise. This work focuses on the impact of these distresses on environmental noise. To calculate the environmental noise, a method to transform Close ProXimity (CPX) measurement results into the required input for traffic noise models was defined and used. The tyre/road noise levels were determined by the CPX method for three types of pavement, with three types of distress, at three different speed levels. The study was carried out in the city center of Guimarães, a medium-sized Portuguese city. Using the NMPB model, 18 noise maps were produced for the passing of one single vehicle, taking into account two levels of distress (50% and 100%) for the pavement. The presence of distresses increased the noise, calculated at control points, by up to 7.1 dBA, and the percentage of the population exposed to levels over 45 dB was more than 11%. It was shown that pavement maintenance at early stages of distress development is, particularly for low-speed roads, very important to reduce environmental noise and population exposure. A comprehensive selection of the type of surface and speed control policies can mitigate the impact of a lack of maintenance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 12561
Author(s):  
Ablenya Grangeiro de Barros ◽  
Jarl K. Kampen ◽  
Cedric Vuye

Low-noise thin asphalt layers (TALs) are a feasible solution to mitigate road traffic noise in urban environments. Nevertheless, the impacts of this type of noise intervention are reported mostly regarding noise levels, while non-acoustic aspects influencing the population perception are still little-known. This study investigates the implementation of TALs in two streets of Antwerp, Belgium. The effectiveness of the intervention was measured via noise modelling and acoustic measurements of road traffic noise. A reduction of 2.8 dB in noise exposure was observed in Lden and Lnight, while SPB measurements showed decreases up to 5.2 dB on the roadside. The subjective impacts of the TALs were evaluated via self-administered surveys and compared to results from control streets. The annoyance indicators were positively impacted by the TALs implementation, resulting in annoyance levels similar or lower than in the control streets. The TALs did not impact the reported physical complaints, sleep quality, and comfort level to perform activities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 263 (2) ◽  
pp. 4058-4069
Author(s):  
Dayane Cristina Lima Estercio ◽  
Paulo Fernando Soares

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.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ni Sheng ◽  
Zherui Xu ◽  
Min Li

The Calculation of Road Traffic Noise (CRTN) model is one of the first traffic noise prediction models in the world and has been widely used in many Western countries. However, its performance in a motorcycle city has not been well assessed. This study aims to examine the accuracy of the CRTN model in predicting traffic noise in an Asian city with over half of motor vehicles being motorcycles. The performance of the CRTN model in predicting both roadside and vertical distributions of traffic noise levels is assessed. The results show that the performance of the CRTN model is satisfactory in predicting roadside traffic noise levels, with anR2of 0.832 and a mean difference of +0.52 dB(A) between the measured and predicted values. The performance of the CRTN model is also satisfactory in predicting vertical distribution of traffic noise levels, with anR2of 0.836 and a mean difference of +0.28 dB(A) between the measured and predicted values.


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