مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

There is a large literature on how noise (or conversely; peace and quiet) is capitalised into housing values. This literature is important as to understand the social cost of noise pollution from different transport modes, which in turn, is important to determine what investments in noise abatements should be prioritised. However, within the body of literature one can find a large spread of estimates of the costs associated with noise pollution. This paper aims at partially explaining these differences by looking at potential differences in transport modes (road and air) in relation to costs associated with noise pollution. One large benefit directly resulting from this approach is that when establishing the relation between transport modes, planners can predict the cost of aircraft noise pollution when only estimates for road noise pollution are available, and vice versa. The findings suggest that the cost of aircraft noise is larger, all else equal, than the cost of road noise. To which there may be several reasons, one being the difference in intensity and unpredictability between the two transport modes. Road noise is normally an ongoing event (when you live in proximity to a road) while aircraft noise is attributed to the landing and take-off cycle. Differences in exposure to noise stemming from different transport modes have been examined in the medicinal field. For example, Stansfeld et al. (2005) argue that aircraft noise has a greater impact on children’s reading capabilities than road noise. Basner et al. (2011) found differences in sleep patterns related to the source of noise pollution.

erences in sleep patterns related to the source of noise pollution. Peace and quiet are goods that cannot be purchased on the open market, yet they are in high demand. This results in a lack of available observable prices for these goods. The common denominator of the included studies of this paper is that they all have approached the valuation of the social cost of noise in the same way, namely though estimation of the Noise Depreciation Index (NDI) using the hedonic modelling framework, where noise levels are associated to property values (rents or prices). The approach is not without its problems but it gives good estimates of the social cost of noise pollution. The included studies do of course differ in a number of ways. Early studies of aircraft noise used Noise Exposure Forecast (NEF) as the measurement of noise (Abelson, 1979; Maser et al., 1977; Nelson, 1979; O’byrne et al., 1985) while estimations ofroad noise have traditionally used different types of equivalent levels (Leq, LAeq) or noise levels throughout the day (Ldn, Lden) as measurement (e.g. Bateman et al., 2001; Grue et al., 1997; Renew, 1996). Later, studies of aircraft noise adopted the same measures as road noise studies. Studies also differ in terms of data availability. Some rely on aggregate prices at, for example, the census tract (e.g. Nelson, 1979; Price, 1974; De Vany, 1976). With better data availability, later studies have access to more disaggregated data and focus on individual sales (e.g. Brandt and Maennig, 2011; Blanco and Flindell, 2011; Levesque, 1994) or rents (e.g. Baranzini et al., 2010; Püschel and Evangelinos, 2012). Furthermore, studies may differ in terms of model specification where most use a semilogarithmic approach, with a few exceptions. These differences, aside from the mode of transport under study, may all be causes of the differences in estimated costs of noise pollution.

The remainder of the paperis structured as follows. In Section2the most common approach to estimating the cost of noise pollution will be described. In section 3 the meta-analysis performed here is discussed, with the results presented in section 4. Section 5 concludes.