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

Sustainability

SeoIl Chang¹  Taeho Park²  Chaemi Jang²  Kyung-A Sim³  Taeryang Choung⁴  Dongju Seo⁵  Minho Kim⁶ 

[1] Environment Research Institute of Gwangju, Gwangju 61976, Korea;Department of Environmental Engineering, University of Seoul, Seoul 02504, Korea;Gwangju Metropolitan City Office, Gwangju 61945, Korea;NVT Co. Ltd., Seoul 04597, Korea;;Public Health &School of Space and Environment Studies, Sangmyung University, Seoul 03061, Korea;

关键词: road-traffic noise;    negative health impacts;    annoyance;    sleep disturbance;    3-D noise map;   

DOI  :  10.3390/su10082947

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

Unknown