Context sensitive road traffic noise impact mapping—Taking the neighborhood soundscape into account

Abstract

Road traffic noise exposure contour maps are difficult to interpret by nonexperts who are familiar with neither the road traffic noise exposure measures nor their associated impacts. An alternative is to map impacts such as annoyance. However, in urban areas the noise impacts are multi-factorially determined and context sensitive. In particular people become more annoyed by a given noise level at the most exposed facade of their dwelling when their neighborhood soundscape is even noisier. A two-tiered approach makes use of contextual soundscape information in determining noise impacts and builds contiguous neighborhood sonoscapes delimiting neighborhood areas with similar noise impacts. Neighborhood sonoscape maps facilitate a more precise targeting of local noise abatement measures, and can illustrate the impacts of noise abatement measures. With appropriate classification and class labels neighborhood sonoscapes provide an environmental labeling of the expected perceived sound quality of the neighborhood for consumers, the public and planners. Neighborhood sonoscape maps may be utilized for national stratification and subsequent two-stage cluster sampling of the population. The advantage of this approach is that focused traffic counts, extended sound modeling and monitoring of noise abatement procedures, population composition, etc. can be undertaken for a limited representative set of neighborhood sonoscapes.