Environmental Methods for Transport Noise Reduction

Mats Nilsson is professor in psychology at Gösta Ekman Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Sweden. Jörgen Bengtsson is senior health inspector at Stockholm City’s Environment and Health Administration, Sweden.Ronny Klæboe is associate professor and chief research officer at the Institute of Transport Economics, Oslo, Norway.

"… covers an interesting and topical area… nicely produced and forms a permanent record of the outcomes of an interesting project which will surely be useful as a basis for further research and for application of these techniques in practice."—Journal of Sound and Vibration, 2015"Highway noise, for the most part, at least in North America, is abated with highway barriers. These barriers…are meant to reduce noise to residents or to "quiet areas" that are on the opposite side of the roadway. …This book takes an alternate approach, one using environmental methods to reduce noise. … Environmental Methods basically presents the finding of the research project, "Holistic and Sustainable Abatement of Noise by optimized combinations of Natural and Artificial Means", referred to as "HOSANNA". …The book is written so laypersons and experts can read and understand the concepts… It is highly recommended to any acoustical engineer, highway planner, community groups or others who care about mitigation of vehicle noise."—Noise Control Engineering Journal, January-February 2015"… describes the results of research into new and novel noise mitigation solutions in an accessible form which will allow designers and policy makers to readily understand the benefits and encourage the use of these methods. The authors have avoided presenting the underlying academic detail and the reader is given the results as simple dB reductions. The authors also describe the limitations of methods where they exist and thus provide the tools for informed decision making on future noise mitigation policy."—Colin English, Chartered acoustic engineer and author "... is the book worth reading? The answer is definitely yes. The book gives lots of useful theoretical, computational and practical information and, I think, because of the wide spectrum of its content everybody can find something suited to his or her special interest."—Béla Buna

• Introduction to traffic noise abatement. Innovative barriers. Acoustic performance of vegetation and soil substratum in an urban context. Acoustical characteristics of trees, shrubs, and hedges. Designing vegetation and tree belts along roads. Noise reduction using surface roughness. Porous ground, crops, and buried resonators. Vegetation in urban streets, squares, and courtyards. Perceptual effects of noise mitigation. Economic analyses of surface treatments, tree belts, green façades, barriers, and roofs.