Economic assessment of traffic noise in planning - Danish experiences

In Denmark there is increasing focus on maximizing the socio-economic benefit of environmental investments. The Road Directorate has a long tradition for developing and using cost-benefit evaluation methods, which in-clude external costs such as noise, and recently the Ministry of Transport has published guidelines on how to carry out such evaluations.These methods and guidelines will be introduced as a basis for presenting actual as-sessments.In 2003, a working group with members from six ministries published a suggestion for a strategy to reduce road traffic noise, which focuses on the cost-effectiveness of various means of noise abatement.These means include barriers, various types of pavements, less noisy vehicles and planning initiatives such as reduced speed.In 2004 the Danish Road Institute did a technical and socio-economic evaluation of using various pave-ments - including noise reducing pavements - on a widening of the Motorring 3 in Copenhagen.The initial Danish results of analyses of cost benefit assessments presented in this paper were carried out in a co-operation with the Danish (DRI) and Dutch (DWW) road institutes.The two institutes have signed a contract called the DRI-DWW noise abatement program.This is part of the large Dutch Innovation Program on Noise, also called the IPG research program.