Transportation noise: Nuisance or disability?

Abstract

This paper reviews the state of the art with respect to the valuation of transportation noise nuisance. It considers recent movements away from values based on revealed or stated preferences (SP) to values based on disability weights. Posing the question as to whether the experience of noise nuisance constitutes a disability. Environmental noise imposes amenity losses and adverse health outcomes on the population. As the world becomes more urban, increasingly motorized and aviation growth persists, noise nuisance is likely to affect ever more people. In identifying and prioritising interventions to reduce experienced noise, it is essential to identify the benefits not just in terms of decibel reductions but in terms of the economic benefits of achieving such changes so these may be compared with costs of interventions to ensure best value for money. The values from a recent meta-analysis of SP studies are compared with those derived using the more conventional hedonic pricing (HP) approach including meta-analyses of HP studies of aircraft noise and more recent developments with respect to assessing annoyance in the form of disability adjusted life years (DALYS) and applying a value of a quality adjusted life year (QALY) to this.