Traffic Noise Assessment of Developing Urban Arias in Greece - The City of Athens Case

摘要

This paper describes a statistical method for assessing disturbance in distinctly populated arias due to traffic noise elaborating the concept on noise events. Traffic noise assessment is usually produced using (L(A)eq) levels for every hour which correspond to a continuous stationary noise source equivalent to the non-stationary sound pressure levels actually measured in an acoustic environment. It is obvious that this index is not taking in to account differences of the (L(A)eq) levels or noise events occurring in the time interval of one hour. In addition to using the A-weighted equivalent continuous sound level L((A)eq), as an index of annoyance this approach uses additional parameters such as: the amplitude difference between the sound pressure level of noise events in comparison to the background noise, the number and the frequency of occurrence of events and the short time spectral characteristics of noise. The method detects events and classifies according to the disturbance they may cause. The developed method was used to assess disturbance from road traffic noise of major motorways in the city of Athens, Greece as well as railway and air traffic noise. Several noise descriptors were either measured or calculated and used to evaluate the disturbance caused by transportation noise.