Optimised Pavements Towards Innovative Mitigation of Urban noiSe

ongoing

Road traffic is considered as the dominant source of environmental noise and at least 20% of the EU population lives in areas where prolonged exposure to road traffic noise levels causes health hazards. In the last years experts have developed and tested solutions (asphalts, barriers, traffic management strategies, etc.) to try to mitigate this issue. In particular, several EU co-funded projects, mainly under the LIFE programme, have been carried out focusing on the design of low-noise asphalts and their test in different contexts. All these projects provided the community with innovative techniques and sustainable products and evaluated their efficiency in several ways. However, in most cases only acoustic performances were monitored, this providing limited information for future application by road manager decision makers. Moreover, acoustic performances evaluation is often carried out only during the projects’ implementation. These issues are addressed in the LIFE OPTIMUS (Optimised Pavements Towards Innovative Mitigation of Urban noise) by a multi-decision criteria analysis (MDCA) for the evaluation of the low-noise pavements accounting for complex set of parameters including texture properties, costs, environmental impact, durability. This evaluation will consequently allow the choice of the best mitigation solutions for the urban context over the whole life cycle effects in different scenarios, depending on vehicles speed, fleet characteristics, urbanisation context, etc. The MCDA analysis will be supported by the definitions of specific surfaces within the CNOSSOS EU model, allowing the calculation of their provisional long-term effects. To this aim the optimization of the procedure for estimating the correction coefficients of low-noise pavements will be the base to develop coefficients for new surfaces implemented in this project and for estimating effects within the whole life cycle, enabling replicability and provisional MCDA evaluation in other sites.