The Future City Will Be Smart but Not Quiet at All…
A de-muffled motorbike crossing Paris at night can wake 11000 people up in merely a few minutes of riding !
Urban noise is a growing concern as our cities are getting denser. Although transport noise is unlikely to instantly damage your hearing system, long-term exposure to noise above a certain level can cause annoyance, sleep disturbance, and even impact the cardiovascular system and metabolism, as well as induce cognitive impairment in children.
22 million people in Europe suffer from chronic high annoyance due to traffic noise according to World Health Organization (Environmental Noise Guidelines For The European Region, 2018).
Certainly, public authorities are increasingly aware of this issue. Green mobility is encouraged by supporting electric cars and cycling in addition to giving more space to pedestrians and green spaces. New vehicles and aircraft tend to be less noisy (excepting motorbike!). Also, home working is becoming more and more adopted.
Still, the progress achieved on one side is about to be offset on the other side: new modes of transportation will pop up in our cities in the coming years !
The city skies will be virtually divided into several multi-layer corridors reserved for delivery drones and electric aircraft (eVTOL). Some corridors will act as air highway resonating, in the rush hour, like the flight of a bee swarm !
The new noise is likely to complicate efforts to reduce urban noise. Indeed, drones are expected to see exponential growth in the coming years.
Moreover, new electric vehicles are required to be noisy for pedestrian safety: since 2021, electric cars in the EU have to make an artificial noise as they fall at a speed of less than 19km/h.
The good news is that this situation will create a lot of jobs for acoustic and building engineers! The future air corridors will be monitored and noise data analysed in real-time. On the other hand, the new building materials will have a better noise absorption rate, especially at low frequencies.
Some cities, like Paris and Brussels, have already rolled out a network of permanent measurement sites to monitor urban traffic noise.
In the future, such sites equipped with acoustic cameras will be deployed a bit everywhere. Thanks to artificial intelligence and to more effective cellular technologies (5G, 6G,…), it shall be feasible to thrive all the gathered data in order to fulfill mainly 3 goals:
- better informing the regulator authorities to optimize both airborne and vehicle traffic ;
- better informing the public;
- prosecuting traffic norm offenders.
Having that made clear, I guess that except the future drone noise, other traffic noise growth will be somehow counteracted by the impact of regulation measures as stated in the 2018 report of European Environment Agency.
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