London Road Traffic Noise Map

Atkins was commissioned by Defra to create a road traffic noise map for the whole of Greater London using its NoiseMap Server Edition software.  This was the largest noise map ever produced at the time of publication.
Noise levels were calculated from a three-dimensional computer model of the whole of the Greater London Authority’s area, as a pilot for the national ambient noise strategy and the EU’s Environmental Noise Directive.
This was a multi-disciplinary project, involving Noise, GIS, photogrammetry and software training specialists within Atkins, and liaison with all 33 London Boroughs, GLA and other stakeholders. 
The map covers an area of over 1,600 square kilometres, containing 2.67 million buildings considered to be acoustically significant and over 5,200 kilometres of roads carrying significant traffic flows. 
Roads are represented by 120,578 road segments with more than 21,100 different traffic flows distributed over the network.  The traffic flows vary from virtually zero up to 171,800 vehicles per 18 hours, at average speeds varying from 2 km per hour to 106 km per hour. 
The topographical model (defining ground contours and type of ground cover) has over 138,000 polylines in it, containing 1.1 million vertices (data points). 
The map contains about 16.6 million calculation points, with 25 noise values at each point. In addition, there are 207,516 noise contour images for web-viewing, requiring 931 Mbyte of storage.

The map was calculated by a grid of multiple computers and can be viewed at. It can be queried by address, postcode or grid reference.  The underlying noise model can be modified to take account of changes in traffic flows, new developments and other changes.  The GIS contains population data and information on number of people exposed to a particular noise level, which can be used for identifying noise hot-spots and designing noise mitigation measures.

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