Impact Assessment of Traffic Noise in a Densely Populated Industrial City, Faisalabad Pakistan Using Geostatistical Approach and Development of Sustainable Transportation System Framework

Abstract

ABSTRACT Haphazard and noisy traffic in congested and densely populated old cities has become a challenge for the environmental and transportation engineers to provide better means of transportation with raised quality of life and environment. Faisalabad is an old and major industrial city of Pakistan, which has huge influx of population due to its industrial significance. It has been facing severe traffic issues, which result in a noisy and irritating environment all around. This research work was planned to find out the health impact of noisy traffic on the residents and their social life, determining noise level variation trends with the changing density of traffic at different time intervals in a day and how variations occur during different weekdays. This study was focused to enquire the severity of noise levels due to road traffic with reference to significant selected locations throughout the city. It was aimed to develop a framework for a sustainable transportation system for Faisalabad city to cope with severe health impacts. Peak and average values were measured at significant locations, and GIS maps were also drawn spatially to demonstrate clusters of dense traffic at specific time. Furthermore, GS+ and Geostatistical module of Arc GIS 9.3 were used for evaluating sound level data. First, the data were analyzed in GS+, after doing calculation, the best possible model with the highest coefficient of determination (R2) and the minimum error of estimation (RSS) was selected, and the performance of each model was tested using cross-validation and the model which gives best result was used. Spatial prediction maps of noise level data for all the four towns of Faisalabad city were prepared by using the kriging method. Alarmingly high noise levels were observed during peak hours at specific locations. Such findings lead to the development of a framework for a sustainable transportation system to reduce the negative impact on the residents.