A large-scale study of the social response to construction noise in Hong Kong

Abstract

Construction noise is an issue in many large cities with potential annoyance and disturbance effects. With an aim to providing necessary data for formulating noise control strategies, a large-scale social survey was commissioned in Hong Kong and undertaken by a team of acoustic experts in 2018-2020. Based on the interview of around 5,000 randomly selected households following the ISO standard on 11-point numeric scale (ISO/TS 15666, 2003), this was one of the few large-scale studies carried out in a dense and compact city. This paper describes the rationale and approach of the study, the sampling and questionnaire design. Some of the key study findings are presented, highlighting in particular the prevalence and nature of construction and domestic renovation noise; annoyance and sleeping response of the respondents that would be useful for developing construction noise management strategies in Hong Kong. The findings are also compared with the data collected in an earlier similar study undertaken 10 years ago to analyze the trend and changes in people's perception on construction noise impacts.