Acoustic balance between highway and metro: a case study of Dos Hermanas

With the Directive 2002/49 of the European Parliament, commitments are established for the control of noise pollution for member countries. Based on such determination, an important tool for the noise pollution control is the noise map, which represents an area or its population exposed to different ranges of noise. The same Directive defines that environmental noise is influenced by different sources, including transport routes such as road traffic and the subway. This study evaluates the acoustic balance between the Sevilla metro and the A-376 highway traffic. For such assessment, different mobility scenarios have been developed and all of them have been evaluated using noise maps. A residential block in Dos Hermanas, a town in Sevilla province, has been taken as a case study. According to the evaluated scenarios, the population affected by high level noises decreases as the metro is more used than the highway.