PPG 24 Transportation Planning & Noise
This guide notes set out the Government's policies on different aspects of planning. Local authorities must take their content into account in preparing their developing plans. It gives guidance to local authorities in England on the use of their planning powers to minimise the adverse impact of noise. The noise affecting a proposed development can include road traffic, rail traffic, air traffic (all three can be included in transportation noise) and mixed sources (This refers to any combination of road, rail, air and industrial noise sources).
We must undertake studies (transportation or mixed sources) to show local authorities the levels of noise existing in the area where a proposed development will be built. We can produce advice to mitigate the adverse impact of noise according to different abatement measures.
The typical case study is a noise study conducted to assist the requirement information to be given to local officials for use in its planning decisions. In this case transportation noise study and in particular traffic noise.
When a new project is create must be a guarantee that the existing noise levels in the area do not exceed a level which can produce annoyance to the people. The typical study done by our company is the evaluation of traffic noise. In this case noise measurements play an important role for future decisions. A study of the impact of traffic noise affecting a proposed development has been undertaken for a building company. Our company developed a plan to undertake the best location, times and duration of the noise assessment. Following the installation of the noise measurement station and effort was made to achieve a good documentation of the site, traffic and meteorological conditions of the location.
With this relevant information we guarantee a high understanding of the existing ambient noise levels affected by a specific noise source in this case the road traffic. To get a precise information of the area is important to guarantee (in the case required) an effective evaluation of abatement measures such as noise barriers. A 24-hour measurement period was chosen for this study which generate a 24 hourly noise level information. It contents the information for day and night period with the existing off-peak-hour noise level, of course we took all the steps to ensure that our measurement were not contaminated from any undetected noise source. One time the measurement period is finish the information is analyzed and the results compare with appropriate criteria in the road traffic PPG 24 Guideline. The levels in this study where included in category C, in front of this results we offered an evaluating noise abatement options. The abatement options was a detailed analysis about the design of a noise barrier. Our main concern in this study was protect the receivers from excessive noise.
The next step was use a barrier acoustically adequate to the necessities of this particular area affected noise, care was taken to avoid problems of unsafe conditions or visual bight. To ensure the efficiency of our calculation a computer modelling was used where different acoustical material were tested. The final results was a mitigation of 7 dBA good enough to guarantee a change in the PPG 24 noise exposure categories for new dwellings near existing noise source.