Overview
The QCITY project addressed the requirements and needs of municipalities and industry.
The municipalities and industry need to create noise maps, to identify and analyse the noise hot spots and quiet areas, and prepare proper action plans, in order to comply with EC regulations. The QCITY project addressed these needs by providing the municipalities with the tools to meet these requirements (eventually through service providers) and by providing industry with products that enable them to carry out the provisions of the action plans.
The QCITY project aimed at developing an integrated technology infrastructure for the efficient control of road and rail ambient noise by considering the attenuation of noise creation at source at both vehicle/infrastructure levels.
The objective of QCITY was to provide municipalities with tools to establish noise maps and actions plans (Directive 2002/49/EC) and to provide them with a broad range of validated technical solutions for the specific hot-spot problems they encounter in their cities.
QCITY starts from the identification of hot spots on existing noise maps from a large number of cities, using the Stockholm score model. Some noise spots are then researched in detail with specific software in order to find the root causes of the problem. Various solutions were studied for each of the selected hot spots and their effects determined, also by looking at the number of people impacted and the degree of the impact. The entire range of rail transport vehicles, trams, metro, suburban rail and freight, and their associated infrastructure are an integral part of this project, and are treated on the same level as road vehicles (cars, busses, trucks, motorbikes) and their infrastructure.
Besides addressing transport noise problems (at source, propagation and receiver) with conventional technical solutions, QCITY incorporated issues such as traffic control, town planning, architectural features, noise perception issues, intermodal transport, change between transport modes, traffic restrictions, enforcement measures, economic incentive measures, introduction of hybrid vehicles and of new guided public transport vehicles.
In a first phase, emphasis was on noise mapping and on the conceptual design of the considered solution and their potential impact. In the second phase, the most promising solutions were designed in detail for a specific hot-spot problem selected in each participating city. The solutions were implemented in situ and validated.
Funding
Results
The QCITY project covered all aspects of transportation noise and its evaluation. The QCITY projects started off from the existing noise maps, which were refined to include a noise rating model developed to detect and evaluate hot-spots. A series of innovative noise mitigation techniques and products were developed and evaluated. These measures were combined with existing methods to form a cookbook with noise mitigating recipes from which the municipalities can pick and choose to either address their global noise problem or provide an answer to a local complaint. Techniques were developed to integrate solutions that affect only a small area into the noise maps, so that the effects of many of these solutions could be practically evaluated and their effect on the population quantified. A decision support tool was also developed to assist municipalities with the optimisation and selection of mitigation measures.
The work scheduled for the full duration of the project has been completed and the findings reported in the various deliverables that are available on the project’s website (www.qcity.org)