Traffic noise and annoyance: The effect of quiet facades and quiet areas

Quiet façades and quiet areas may reduce effects of road traffic noise by offering the possibility to avoid the noise to some extent for the inhabitants. To date a limited number of studies have investigated this hypothesis. Further quantification of the effect size will be helpful to enable estimation of a beneficial effect on people. Within the framework of EU project QSIDE, the effect of quiet facades and quiet areas on the annoyance response is studied in different EU cities, including Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This paper describes the design of the noise exposure assessment for participants of the Amsterdam study, a population-based survey of inhabitants of Amsterdam. The assessment of exposure to road traffic noise, and preliminary results with respect to beneficial effects of quiet side and quiet areas will be presented and discussed. For all addresses in Amsterdam, different indicators of road traffic noise exposure were assessed. Road traffic noise levels were estimated for the most and least exposed facades of all dwellings, and for the neighbourhood of the dwellings, using engineering modeling techniques and area statistics in GIS. The role of other factors such as accessibility to urban green is also explored