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

Taeho Park, Minho Kim, Chaemi Jang, Taeryang Choung, Kyung-A Sim, Dongju Seo and Seo Il Chang
Additional contact information
Taeho Park: Department of Environmental Engineering, University of Seoul, Seoul 02504, Korea
Minho Kim: School of Space and Environment Studies, Sangmyung University, Seoul 03061, Korea
Chaemi Jang: Department of Environmental Engineering, University of Seoul, Seoul 02504, Korea
Taeryang Choung: NVT Co. Ltd., Seoul 04597, Korea
Kyung-A Sim: Gwangju Metropolitan City Office, Gwangju 61945, Korea
Dongju Seo: Public Health & Environment Research Institute of Gwangju, Gwangju 61976, Korea
Seo Il Chang: Department of Environmental Engineering, University of Seoul, Seoul 02504, Korea

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 8, 1-17

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: road-traffic noise; negative health impacts; annoyance; sleep disturbance; 3-D noise map (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/8/2947/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/8/2947/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:8:p:2947-:d:164581

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().