The public interest in central living in today’s cities has led to an increasing effect of traffic noise pollution, and today 20% of the inhabitants in Sweden suffer from noise a level that exceeds the limits. At the same time the traffic keeps increasing, and recent researches shows that traffic noise pollution and several of today’s most common health issues are connected, for example, reduction of performance, sleeping issues and cardiovascular diseases. For this cause rules, guidelines and environmental goals has been developed, as well as software’s which calculates the levels of pollution, all this to investigate and improve the environment. The guidelines say that the average sound pressure level shouldn’t exceed 55 dBA over 24 hours of the façade, and the maximum level shouldn’t exceed 70 dBA. Today’s issue is that the guidelines isn’t legally binding and therefore they don’t have to be fully achieved which can led to confusion and unfair interpretations in the matter of a building can or cannot be built according to the limits of traffic noise pollution.

The intensions of this report are to improve the urban environment regarding traffic noise pollution and to increase the understanding and knowledge how this issue affects urban areas. The report will also investigate and compare two different calculation methods for traffic noise pollution, the Nordic propagation method and the Nord 2000.

On this basis a literature survey has been done regarding the noise pollution issues in our cities with its rules, guidelines, objective goals, measures and the two different calculation methods. Investigations of different shapes of a building has been done in combination with the software for calculation of road traffic noise Soundplan, and a case study of a site which is located in the centre of Jönköping. The workflow has been reversed from the “normal”, were the building were designed after the limits of the noise levels were investigated. This resulted in a residential proposal which is optimized from a traffic noise point of view, and uses its own body as a shield. The condoles are directed away from the source of noise and the parking space are placed towards the roads. The final result has been analysed with both of the calculation methods, were a slightly differentiation between the methods can be seen. This is causes by the way the calculation methods deal with information and the differentiation in the calculation methods.

The conclusions from this report are that the traffic noise pollution is one of our major health issues which still are increasing. The main problem in this is that there’s several unmeasurable parameters which influences the way an individual experiences the sound environment, which contributes to the difficulty to establish a proper regulations and standards. Regarding the calculation methods there is issues to use Nord 2000, because the method requires large amounts of information which can be difficult to access. At the same time the Nordic propagation method can show incorrectly results because it hasn’t the same ability to adapt to the specific conditions at each location.