A Street Categorization Method to Study Urban Noise: The Valladolid (Spain) Study

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Abstract
We describe the application of a categorization method for road traffic noise (TN) evaluation. The method assumes that urban noise is stratified according to a five-category classification of streets based only on their use as communication routes. The method has previously been shown to be valid for towns under 220,000 inhabitants, and in the present case is applied to study the urban noise in Valladolid (Spain), a town with a population of nearly 320,000 inhabitants. Novel mathematical tools in this field are used to analyze the method. We demonstrate the existence of a stratification of the streets sound levels. Thus, the categories defined seem to be quite adequate for towns of this size range. Moreover, noise level predictive capacity of the method was also analyzed, and an overall value for the predictive capacity of 80% was obtained. Thus, our method can be a simple, low-cost strategy to make a statistical evaluation of the TN in a city.

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