Road Traffic Noise Modeling. Case Study: Vaslui Town, North-Eastern Romania.

Abstract

In the last decades, the issue of environmental noise was highly debated as globalization and the automotive industry spread out. In Europe, the European Directive 2002/49/EC is at the moment the leading regulation directed to all Member States. It describes methods of assigning and modeling the environmental noise and sets as mandatory reporting the population size affected by the noise levels over the limit set by the national legislations. The current paper is concerned with the modeling of one of the main noise sources - road traffic. The methodology flow used in this study follows in terms of accuracy, complexity and cost of obtaining the data the current national legislation recommendations in the field of environmental noise management and evaluation (Government Decision no.321/2005). The study area is represented by the main streets crossing Vaslui town and a buffer of 50 m along of them, thus including the closest buildings to the road network. This area comprises a population of 9,858 inhabitants (9.87% of the total urban population). The software used to map the road traffic noise was QGIS Brighton 2.6.1. (opeNoise plugin), having as main emission source the road network inside the study area and as attribute the number of vehicles together with some other quantitative and qualitative factors that might affect the sound power and its propagation. The data acquisition and the interim computation method used in the current paper are in accordance with the National Legislation. The final result is represented by the noise maps for the two most important noise indexes: Lden and Lnight.

Keywords

• Vaslui town
• environmental noise
• road traffic
• GIS modeling
• acoustic noise modeling