ASSESSMENT OF THE POPULATION EXPOSED TO ROAD TRAFFIC GENERATED NOISE. CASE STUDY: VASLUI TOWN, ROMANIA

Abstract

According to the Directive 2002/49/EC of the European Parliament and Council of 25 June 2002 relating to the assessment and management of environmental noise, a road traffic noise evaluation should end with an estimation of the exposed population. Based on this, further actions can be implemented in order to diminish the effect the environmental noise has on people within urban areas. The road traffic generated noise is one of the four main noise sources that are currently being under study; the others being the rail network, aviation and industrial areas. The current paper estimates the population exposure to the road traffic noise in an area comprising 9.87% of the total population of Vaslui town, North-Eastern Romania. The methodology followed in the first place a pattern for the noise levels generation. In order to accomplish this, a spatial database was created including the buildings and the road network of the study area. These features were assigned specific attributes being mandatory for the current study, like population size per building, building types, traffic volume etc. The noise simulation was then performed by the opeNoise plugin of QGIS Brighton 2.6.1. The result was a grid of points with different noise levels for two noise indexes: Lday-evening-night and Lnight. After the grid interpolation, the noise layers were used to calculate the impacted population size, implementing a method arisen from the European Commission recommendations.