Noise annoyance and willingness to pay of inhabitants exposed to transport noise

Abstract

During the process of European integration the question arose how a standard could be created to assess qualitative and quantitative effects deriving from the development of transport infrastructures. The issue gets an even higher emphasis in case of valuation the development of large projects which impact several countries. The main aim of the research was to determine how much people are bothered, disturbed or annoyed by noise, and then to establish a correlation between this and their willingness to pay, and the absolute noise levels. This paper summarizes the survey and its results. Noise influences people´s well being and standard of living. It is the only environmental pollution where it is not a polluting material that effects the body adversely - as it is in the case of air or water pollution -, but the danger is created by an energy overdose reaching the sensory and data processing organs. Here we talk about nervous processes and this characteristic distinguishes noise pollution from all the other contaminating factors. It has also got to be mentioned that perceiving noise is very subjective. The reaction of people is largely predetermined by how they relate to the noise source. Noise annoyance can be determined by socio-acoustical studies. The essence of these is that they do not only take into account decibel levels, but attach so called annoyance levels to the given sound pressure levels.