Comparison of predictive models of road traffic noise, through measurements in the city of Osorno

Abstract

The progressive increase of the number of cars in different cities of Chile entails an increase of noise range. This way, the road traffic constitutes the main source of noise pollution in the cities of the country. The traffic noise prediction allows obtaining the data that must be considered in the planning of road networks, however, the great amount of variables that take part in this prediction requires the predictive models to be tested and calibrated for each local reality, in order to obtain reliable results. This study presents results of two different methodology, one refer to simple mathematic predictive models of traffic noise and other refer to software for prediction of environmental noise, to have the international standards to evaluate the traffic noise. These results are compared with the measures obtained from Osorno city, located in Los Lagos region in the south of Chile. This analysis allows us to establish the best evaluated predictive model, through a validation done with measurements on studied roads in the same city, according to the local characteristics and the number of cars.