The Public Health Impact of Road-Traffic Noise in a Highly-Populated City, Republic of Korea: Annoyance and Sleep Disturbance

Abstract

Sustainable transportation is an essential part of a sustainable city; however, modern transportation systems with internal-combustion engines emits unacceptably high level of air-pollutants and noise. It is recognized widely that road-traffic noise has negative health impacts (such as annoyance and sleep disturbance) on exposed population in highly-populated cities. These harmful effects should be removed or at least reduced to guarantee the sustainability of modern cities. The estimation of pollutant levels at a specific location and the extent of the damage is therefore important for policy makers. This study presents a procedure to determine the levels of road-traffic noise at both day and night, and an assessment of the adverse health effects across Gwangju Metropolitan City (GMC), Republic of Korea (ROK). Road-traffic noise maps in 2-D and 3-D were generated, in order to find spatial distribution of noise levels across the city and noise level at the façade of a building-floor, respectively. The adoption of existing assessment models for the highly-annoyed (%HA) and highly-sleep-disturbed (%HSD) leads to building-based estimation of the affected population and spatial distribution of the road networks of the city. Very high noise levels were found to exist along major roads in the day and at night, with little difference between them. As a result, approximately 10% and 5% of the total population (n = 1,471,944) were estimated to experience high-level annoyance and sleep disturbance, respectively.

Performance Evaluation of Distance Measurement Methods for Construction Noise Prediction Using Case-Based Reasoning

“…A number of environment-related problems are a concern around the world. Specifically, construction noise is globally regarded as a major nuisance because of its harmful effects on human health and the environment [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]14,15]. Such noises may lead to serious risk and excessive expenditure caused by project delays for construction firms [8,10,22].…”

“…Environmental issues are a growing concern, and environmental pollution is globally recognized as a serious problem in modern society that adversely affects people and their surroundings [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Because of environmental pollution and nuisances, a number of related complaints and disputes have arisen [3,[9][10][11][12][13].…”

“…Because of environmental pollution and nuisances, a number of related complaints and disputes have arisen [3,[9][10][11][12][13]. In particular, noise from construction projects is considered a principal pollutant that causes harmful effects to neighboring residents and the surrounding environment [7,9,14,15]. Chronic exposure to noise can lead to significant health problems, such as depression [5,8,16,17], hearing impairment [5,18,19], cardiovascular disease [3,20], impaired cognitive performance [1,4], interference of communication [2], general understanding [4], hypertension [2,8,10,20], mental disturbances [3,4,8,16,18], short-term memory impairments [1,2,4], and sleep disorders [2,3,20].…”

Evaluation of the Criteria for Selecting Proposed Variants of Utility Functions in the Adaptation of Historic Regional Architecture

“…The measurement process consisted of obtaining the sound level in room. A procedure based on [52][53][54][55][56][57][58], [59] is also acceptable for a requirement check in accordance with European standards [29] and Polish standards [32]. There were three positions of sound levels located at least 1 m from the internal walls and 1.5 m from external partitions with a window.…”

Pass-by Characterization of Noise Emitted by Different Categories of Seagoing Ships in Ports

“…It has now been demonstrated by many studies that prolonged exposure to noise can induce cardiovascular disease [7,8], alterations in blood pressure [9,10], respiratory diseases [11], hypertension [12], learning impairment [13,14], annoyance [15,16], and sleep disturbance [17][18][19]. In very recent years, awareness on the subject has also reflected on house pricing [20].…”