Method to estimate the road traffic noise exposure distribution in Europe ETC/ACM Technical Paper 2017/10

The main findings are:

• The road traffic noise exposure distribution in Europe was predicted using information about the population density and about the road network density.
• For the EEA-32 it was provisionally estimated that 232 million inhabitants (45% of the total population) are exposed to road traffic noise levels equal or above 55 dB L_den and 153 million inhabitants (30%) to levels equal or above 50 dB L_night. 55 dB L_den and 50 dB L_night are the lowest noise levels for the noise mapping in the framework of the END.
• It was projected that 382 million inhabitants (75%) are exposed to levels equal or above 50 dB L_den and 423 million inhabitants (83%) to levels equal or above 40 dB L_night. A level of 50 dB L_den was considered as interim health based guideline value for the 24 hour period and a value of 40 dB L_night for the night-time.

Prepared by: ETC/ACM Consortium partner members Danny Houthuijs¹, Jaume Fons², Miquel Sáinz de la Maza², Wim Swart¹, Annemarie van Beek^1
1National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), The Netherlands; ²Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB, Spain).

Published by: ETC/ACM, April 2018, 145 pp.