Secondary Analysis of Exposure-response Relationships for Shinkansen Super-express Railway Noise in Japan

Although the Shinkansen super-express railway system has greatly increased its transportation capacity, lots of inhabitants along the railway have been disturbed by noise and vibration from the trains. To preserve the health and environment, the government established the Environmental Quality Standards for Shinkansen super-express railway noise in 1975. The noise shall be evaluated by the maximum-based metrics. However, more than forty years have passed since the establishment. Therefore, the use of energy-based metrics has been discussed. To provide the basic scientific knowledge for the discussion, we made a secondary analysis by using micro dataCsets of the exposure and community responses associated with Shinkansen railway noise. The data were obtained by the seven socio-acoustic surveys conducted for the last twenty years in Japan. Firstly, we examined the effect of vibrations occurred from the trains on the relationships. Annoyance was affected by the vibrations, whereas little effect of the vibrations on listening disturbance was confirmed. Furthermore, adjusting vibrations, frequency of service and demographic factors as confounding factors, we applied a logistic regression analysis and established representative exposure-response relationships.