Abstract
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.
Highlights
Environmental noise, known as community noise, is undesirable sound that is emitted from various sources, including transportation, industries, construction sites, and neighborhoods
Taking environmental noise into account, the European Union (EU) has adopted the Environmental Noise Directive (END) that focuses on assessing population exposed to community noise, reducing harmful noise levels, and mitigating its burden of adverse public health [2,3,4,5]
This research presented an overview of road traffic noise impacts on inhabitants of the highly-populated Gwangju Metropolitan City in the Republic of Korea (ROK)
Summary
Environmental noise, known as community noise, is undesirable sound that is emitted from various sources, including transportation, industries, construction sites, and neighborhoods. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recognized it as a harmful pollutant that has ill impacts on public health [1]. Based on the recent END revision [6], noise pollution continues to be a major environmental problem in Europe with the following consequent set of health effects backed by sufficient evidence: annoyance [7], sleep disturbance with awakenings [8,9], hypertension ischemic heart disease [10,11,12], mental health [13], and even learning impairment [14,15,16]. Annoyance and sleep disturbance are known to be the most important psychological impacts of community noise [17,18,19,20]. Nighttime noise causes interrupted sleep of residents in a community, and disturbed sleep could lead to fatigue, depression, and decreased performance, among others [21,23,24]
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