Burden of traffic noise annoyance

This study developed exposure-response relationships between road, rail, and air traffic noise and high noise annoyance (HNA) and calculated the HNA disease burden in five Bulgarian cities. To that end, we frist based our analyses on a sample of 4640 adults from the five largest cities in Bulgaria, and measured their annoyance form different traffic noise sources with a validated questionnaire. We linked this data to the European Noise Directive maps for these cities. The estimated burden among people exposed to ≥40 dB amounted to over 40 million USD or 200 million EUR, depending on the analytic strategy. We could only derive a plausible exposure-response relationship for railway noise annoyance, so until better exposure-response relationships are derived for the Bulgarian population, we recommend using the WHO curves for road traffic and aircraft noise annoyance.