In 2018, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management published the third END action plan for main roads. Objectives of the END are to identify noise pollution levels and trigger the necessary actions to reduce or prevent increase of environmental noise. For noise policy makers, that raises two questions: 1) Is the number of people exposed to environmental noise growing or decreasing? 2) How effective are noise mitigation measures? The experience of Rijkswaterstaat with the past three rounds of END noise mapping and action plans has shown that it is challenging to answer these questions. Developments in data, calculation methods, legal requirements and software deteriorates the quality of the data in the trend of the estimated noise exposure. This paper shows how Rijkswaterstaat has dealt with these sources of uncertainty in determining the development of noise pollution by main roads in the Netherlands. It is recommended that the data from previous END noise mapping round is used with current noise models to improve trend information.
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