Comparison of noise exposure cost and annoyance-related indicators in microscopic traffic simulations

Road traffic noise is one of the major sources of environmental noise and has been shown to increase risk of adverse health effects. For this reason, noise mapping is an efficient tool to assess and monitor city-wide noise levels in accordance with the Environmental Noise Directive (END). To relate these noise levels to the associated health effects, the noise map may be further analysed using exposure-response models, or with cost models that calculate the noise-related externalities of the traffic. With the use of microscopic traffic simulations, this assessment may be performed at a vehicle-specific level. A recently introduced methodology, the noise exposure cost, calculates the vehicle-specific contribution to the long-term social cost estimated at a macro-level based on the vehicle-specific noise contributions. However, the noise exposure cost methodology may not reflect the relative noise impact of individual vehicles, but rather solely reflect the noise contribution regardless of its relative impact to the noise levels at the time. The aim of this study is to investigate the possibility to use the linear sensitivity indicator as a basis for a non-linear weighting function in the noise exposure cost methodology, to allow the vehicle-specific noise exposure cost to better reflect the relative impact.