How to forecast community annoyance in planning noisy facilities.

ABSTRACT

When planning the development or reduction of large traffic facilities, acoustic calculation procedures are used to forecast the noise load in the affected residential areas. Then, existing dose/response relationships for steady state situations are used to predict noise effects in future years. Planners often assume that (1) noise annoyance reactions of residents do not change over the years, and (2) annoyance is not affected by the change itself. Both of these assumptions are questioned in this paper, and a procedure for estimating future annoyance in changed noise situations is proposed. This includes the analysis of possible statistical trends of the annoyance reactions over the years - even for steady-state noise loads, and with changing state situations, the effects of the change should also be accounted for.