Monitoring and Assessing the Environmental Noise along a Busy Traffic Corridor of Ahmedabad City, India

Abstract

Noise pollution is a growing problem across the world and one which many people may not be aware of the impacts on their health. The environmental noise, and in particular the road traffic noise, remains a major environmental problem affecting the health and well-being of millions of people. With this background, a comprehensive ‘noise pollution assessment study’ was undertaken for a busy traffic corridor of Ahmedabad city of India. The traffic corridor which spans around 22.25 km passes through a mix of different areas like educational, commercials and residential. A two week long field survey was carried out on this corridor during 10-23 May, 2018 at 24 locations spread over the entire corridor. The assessment reveals that the average noise level always exceeded the prescribed guidelines of World Health Organization (WHO) for the daytime noise (75 dB (A) for Industrial area, 65 dB (A) for Commercial area, 55 dB (A) for Residential area and 50 dB (A) for Silence zones), which is quite alarming. For a major portion of the traffic corridor (79.6%), even the minimum noise level was above the permissible average noise level which is a matter of great concern. The highest noise level observed was 86.0 dB (A). Clubbing the ranks of the traffic corridor segments for the noise indicators like LAeq, Lmin, Lmax, L90, L50, L10 and LNP revealed that locations like Akhbarnagar followed by Naranpura were in the nosiest. Looking to implications of the high noise levels on the human health and productivity, it is important to initiate suitable mitigation measures. The present comprehensive study brings forth the spatial and quantitative aspects of noise pollution across the busy corridor of the city which would be of great help to the civic administration in understanding the magnitude of the problem and subsequently initiate suitable mitigative measures.