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Publication Date/Time
2018-03-21T09:00:00+00:00
Measures and solutions for noise pollution
Police sirens, cars accelerating. A major source of the noise you hear
comes from traffic passing by. But how loud are these sounds exactly?
And how is noise pollution different in various parts of the city or
region? European Open Data Portal datasets tell you the answers on
these questions for several countries. This article highlights four
country examples.

The city of Dublin (Ireland) has measured the noise pollution during
day and nighttime on the roads and published this data
[/data/en/dataset/noise-maps-from-traffic-sources-in-dublin-city-council]
in the report Revision of Noise Maps and Action plans. During daytime,
the band starts at 55 decibels, whereas the band starts at 50 decibels
for the nighttime.
[https://data.europa.eu/sites/default/files/img/media/wdys-dublin.png]
Figure 1 Cropped map of the city of Dublin: red highlights an
undesired sound level, yellow a satisfactory level and green a
desirable sound level, find the map here
[https://data.smartdublin.ie/dataset/5ff02a26-4bbe-4a10-96a8-4a30f059e9d6/resource/b42105cf-c2cd-4789-9229-014d7c02a991/download/nightcontours2012p20130115-0938.pdf].

 

In Italy, certain urban areas suffer from too much noise pollution. In
order to solve this issue, an action plan was introduced. The solution
[/data/en/dataset/piano-d-azione-rumore-da-traffico-2013] was to adopt
a directive related to the assessment and management of the
environmental noise. In the picture below, you can find a computer
simulation of what that means in practice.
[https://data.europa.eu/sites/default/files/img/media/wdys-italy.png]
Figure 2 The Italian government decided to place a sound wall to
decrease noise pollution. You can find more details on this solution
here
[http://www.appa.provincia.tn.it/binary/pat_appa/rumore_progetti_studi/ISTRUZIONI_UTILIZZO_FILES_KMZ.1377762455.pdf].

 

A noise overview from the Netherlands makes no distinction between
noise during day and night. It includes a calculation of weighted
noise per day. This score
[/data/en/dataset/geluidkaart-hoofdspoornet-2011-lden] is compared to
the requirements of the Noise Abatement Act, to decide whether there
is too much noise or not. In the area of Brussels (Belgium),
monitoring stations were installed to measure the noise level. Curious
about the measurement results? Take a look at this dataset
[/data/en/dataset/http-data-gov-be-dataset-brussels-f27ac09e-b7ee-46e4-977d-cc022ae748bb].

Whenever you are interested in the noise levels within your city or
area or will soon move to a new city and would like to take the noise
level into account, it can pay off to browse through the available
datasets in the European Open Data Portal
[/data/en/dataset?q=noise&sort=score+desc%2C+metadata_modified+desc&ext_geo_input=&ext_bbox=&ext_prev_extent=-154.68749999999997%2C-80.17871349622823%2C154.68749999999997%2C80.17871349622823].
