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Annoyance from Road Traffic Noise

A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Health".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2021) | Viewed by 10290

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Sustainable Communication Technologies, SINTEF Digital, N-7465 Trondheim, Norway
Interests: community noise; people's reactions to noise
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Road traffic is by far the most prominent source for environmental noise and a source that has a large negative impact on people. Annoyance from road traffic noise is a frequently mentioned stressor, and the World Health Organization estimates that here are about 500 000 DALYs lost every year due to traffic noise-induced annoyance within the EU population living in urban areas alone.

An important step in the effort to reduce the negative impact from road traffic is to be able to accurately describe the traffic noise-induced annoyance. Surveys to establish so-called exposure-response functions for annoyance from road traffic noise are being conducted world-wide. There is a large spread in the reported data. No reliable explanation has yet been offered to explain these large discrepancies. There are claims that the annoyance response is increasing, but such claims are refuted by others. The World Health Organization has recently proposed to lower the recommended "safe" exposure level. 

This Special Issue seeks research papers on annoyance from road traffic noise with a special focus on explaining the large differences that can be found between different communities.

Dr. Truls T Gjestland
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • Annoyance
  • Road traffic noise
  • Exposure-response functions
  • Non-acoustic factors

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 1384 KiB  
Article
Short-Term Annoyance Due to Night-Time Road, Railway, and Air Traffic Noise: Role of the Noise Source, the Acoustical Metric, and Non-Acoustical Factors
by Sarah Weidenfeld, Sandra Sanok, Rolf Fimmers, Marie-Therese Puth, Daniel Aeschbach and Eva-Maria Elmenhorst
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(9), 4647; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094647 - 27 Apr 2021
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 2594
Abstract
Field studies on traffic noise-induced annoyance have predominantly used estimated outside noise levels. We intended to complement existing knowledge with exposure–response relationships that are based on precise indoor noise measurements. Acoustic recordings inside the bedrooms of nightly road traffic and annoyance ratings in [...] Read more.
Field studies on traffic noise-induced annoyance have predominantly used estimated outside noise levels. We intended to complement existing knowledge with exposure–response relationships that are based on precise indoor noise measurements. Acoustic recordings inside the bedrooms of nightly road traffic and annoyance ratings in the following morning were obtained from 40 suburban residents (mean age 29.1 years ± 11.7; 26 females). We derived exposure–response functions for the probability to be “annoyed at least a little” (%LA). Further analyses compared data from the current study with those from two earlier studies on railway and aircraft noise. Annoyance increased with the number of traffic events and the equivalent sound pressure level. The inclusion of non-acoustical factors (such as assessment of road transport) improved the prediction considerably. When comparing the different traffic noise sources, %LA was higher for road than for air traffic at a given LAeq,night, but higher for road and railway than for air traffic at a given number of noise events. Acoustical as well as non-acoustical factors impact short-term annoyance induced by road, railway, and air traffic. Annoyance varies across noise sources, which may be due to differences in acoustical characteristics or in the temporal noise distribution throughout the night. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Annoyance from Road Traffic Noise)
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15 pages, 2027 KiB  
Article
Effects of Motorcycle Noise on Annoyance—A Cross-Sectional Study in the Alps
by Christoph Lechner, David Schnaiter, Uwe Siebert and Stephan Böse-O’Reilly
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17(5), 1580; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17051580 - 29 Feb 2020
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 4550
Abstract
Motorcycle noise is an increasing noise problem, especially in Alpine valleys with winding roads and low environmental noise. The annoyance response to motorcycle engine noise is extraordinarily high in comparison to other traffic noise and cannot be explained by standard noise assessment curves. [...] Read more.
Motorcycle noise is an increasing noise problem, especially in Alpine valleys with winding roads and low environmental noise. The annoyance response to motorcycle engine noise is extraordinarily high in comparison to other traffic noise and cannot be explained by standard noise assessment curves. Therefore, the Tyrolean state government decided to initiate a multi-purpose study. Exposures were calculated based on sound-measurements taken across the entire district of Reutte in the western part of the State of Tyrol and a telephone survey (n = 545) was conducted with regional participants. The influence of demographic characteristics; sensitivity to noise; attitudes towards motorcycles and background noise on the annoyance was examined using bivariate analyses. In addition; exposure-response curves and their 95% confidence intervals with cut-off points of 60% and 72% for “highly annoyed” were created. The exposure annoyance response curves for motorcycle noise show a shift of more than 30 dB in annoyance reaction compared to other road traffic noise. The annoyance response to motorcycle noise in this Alpine region is concentrated on summer Sundays and Saturdays and is independent of the background exposure caused by other road traffic Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Annoyance from Road Traffic Noise)
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14 pages, 1529 KiB  
Article
On the Temporal Stability of People’s Annoyance with Road Traffic Noise
by Truls Gjestland
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17(4), 1374; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17041374 - 20 Feb 2020
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 2422
Abstract
Sixty-one social surveys on annoyance caused by road traffic noise conducted world-wide over a period of forty-five years have been re-analyzed by various means for possible temporal trends. Eighteen of these surveys were conducted after 2000. People’s reactions to road traffic noise seem [...] Read more.
Sixty-one social surveys on annoyance caused by road traffic noise conducted world-wide over a period of forty-five years have been re-analyzed by various means for possible temporal trends. Eighteen of these surveys were conducted after 2000. People’s reactions to road traffic noise seem to have been stable across the study period. No indications were found that would warrant revision of the current EU reference curve for predicting the annoyance from road traffic noise. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Annoyance from Road Traffic Noise)
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