No abstract

As cities grow bigger, traffic noise gets worse. In order to help in the determination of noisy areas, the LACEAC prepared a measurement protocol to aid in this task. This protocol is the base for a recommendation to the cities’ governments. To put together this protocol, the LACEAC has analyzed different legislation together with measurements taken in several pilot areas of the city of Buenos Aires and determined the best approach based on the cultural habits of the city inhabitants. This protocol thus recommends the way that measurement locations should be determined, exposure time, the way to take the measurements, to study the results and to draw the noise maps.

In the last decades, many cities of the Buenos Aires Province, in Argentina, have grown significantly. This expansion was a disorderly process, and produced important damage to environmental quality, expressed among other things, as high levels of acoustical contamination. Not many measures have been taken in order to obtain an effective solution to this problem. The cities’ governments could only take limited action using several regulations which only partially answer the people’s complaints. Regarding this situation it becomes necessary to create legal regulations for the jurisdictions mentioned before, in order to include the whole matter from a holistic and systematic point of view. The purpose of this law is to create an easy tool for the cities’ governments to use, thus allowing them to deal with the acoustic contamination problem in a global manner, and not in a fragmented way as it is now. The proposed law is oriented to the prevention, monitoring, and correction of the acoustic contamination for the whole provincial jurisdiction, and brings together as an innovation the fields of environment, planning, and noise. (To be presented in Spanish.)

The Acoustic and Electroacoustic Laboratory of the Buenos Aires University is working on a Traffic Noise Recommendation to be used in Argentina. To that end, measurements of traffic noise due to heavy cargo transport services were taken in a Buenos Aires neighbourhood, especially asked for by a neighborhood association. The goal of this measurement was to try to define a correct standard set for the annoyance level in order to pass that information to the city government and work together to improve the living standard of the inhabitants. The measured indexes were Leq, L90 and L10, as well as octave measurement focused on frequencies under 250 Hz. This paper will show the results of the measurements and the conclusions that were made.

According to an agreement between the concessionary company of the highways crossing Buenos Aires City (AUSA) and the School of Engineering of The Buenos Aires University, measurements of the sound level were made in the neighborhood of primary schools and high schools near the roads. The purpose of this work was to supply registered values to be able to obtain a general knowledge of sound levels ‘‘in front of’’ and ‘‘inside’’ schools, as reliably as possible. Relying on the previous measurements of some points, the registered values can be compared with the previous ones and possible changes of the sound level produced in the last times can also be estimated. Finally, the work was completed with the study of possibility of acoustic attenuation using noise barriers in critical areas because of high levels of pollution.