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Statistical models that can generate a road-traffic noise map for a city or area where only elementary urban design factors are determined, and where no concrete urban morphology, including buildings and roads, is given, can provide basic but essential information for developing a quiet and sustainable city. Long-term cost-effective measures for a quiet urban area can be considered at early city planning stages by using the statistical road-traffic noise map. An artificial neural network (ANN) and an ordinary least squares (OLS) model were developed by utilizing data on urban form indicators, based on a 3D urban model and road-traffic noise levels from a normal noise map of city A (Gwangju). The developed ANN and OLS models were applied to city B (Cheongju), and the resultant statistical noise map of city B was compared to an existing normal road-traffic noise map of city B. The urban form indicators that showed multi-collinearity were excluded by the OLS model, and among the remaining urban forms, road-related urban form indicators such as traffic volume and road area density were found to be important variables to predict the road-traffic noise level and to design a quiet city. Comparisons of the statistical ANN and OLS noise maps with the normal noise map showed that the OLS model tends to under-estimate road-traffic noise levels, and the ANN model tends to over-estimate them.

To understand the relationship between road-traffic noise and urban components such as population, building, road-traffic and land-use, the city of Cheongju that already has road-traffic noise maps of daytime and nighttime was selected for this study. The whole area of the city is divided into square cells of a uniform size and for each cell, the urban components are estimated. A spatial representative noise level for each cell is determined by averaging out population-weighted facade noise levels for noise exposure population within the cell during nighttime. The relationship between the representative noise level and the urban components is statistically modeled at the cell level.Specially, we introduce a spatial auto regressive model and a spatial error model that turns out to explain above 85 % of the noise level. These findings and modeling methods can be used as a preliminary tool for environmental planning and urban design in modern cities in consideration of noise exposure.

The purpose of this study is to present a guideline to design a short-term manual measurement of environmental noise level, which is more economical and flexible, but less representative than long-term automatic measurement. The proposed guideline can provide the number of measurement times and the length of measurement term required to secure the extent of the representativeness.The data was collected at 4 sites located in Seoul and at 4 sites located outside of Seoul. The probabilities for five-minute equivalent noise levels, Leq,5min, to stay in an error range from the quarterly representative noise level were used to evaluate sampling techniques. The probability analysis of the daytime period showed that the noise levels measured between 10 am and 2 pm and between 9 pm and 10 pm have the probabilities higher than 60 %. On the other hand, even for the same length of total measurement time, increasing the number of random samplings results in higher probabilities than increasing the length of measurement term.

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