A New Approach to Implementing Facade Treatments in Context of the South Australian Road Traffic Noise Guidelines

Abstract

With the growing social awareness of the potential health impacts related to high road noise exposure upon communities, government noise policies must strike a reasonable and practicable balance between the needs of building and maintaining safe and efficient road transport infrastructure and the need to provide an appropriate level of residential amenity. Providing this balance in practice presents a challenge to policy makers, planners and designers, particularly in the case of major upgrades to existing infrastructure, where a number of social and economic constraints exist. Recently, the South Australian Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure revised its Road Traffic Noise Guidelines to adopt a new approach to the implementation of facade treatments (amongst other amendments). This paper provides insight into the development of the facade treatment approach and also expands with some of the new methodologies developed to implement the approach in practice on a major transport infrastructure project in South Australia.