INTER-NOISE 2007

28-31 AUGUST 2007ISTANBUL, TURKEY

Noise monitoring in the Rotterdam area

(Depreciation of house prices and health effects)

Henk Wolfert

DCMR EPACentre for Environmental ExpertisesNoise SectionP.O. Box 843 SCHIEDAMNETHERLANDS

ABSTRACT

In 2004 a survey has been conducted in the Rotterdam Area to determine the health effectsof noise. Besides annoyance and high annoyance also the number of sleep disturbed peopleand the percentage of people suffering from hypertension caused by noise wasinvestigated. The survey was carried out by the DCMR Environmental Protection Agency(DCMR EPA) in cooperation with the Rotterdam Public Health Service and the NationalInstitute for Public Health and Environment. A high number of annoyed en highly annoyedpeople has been found during the survey. It showed that in the Rotterdam Area thepercentage of annoyed people is more than twice the number of the Netherlands. Thesurvey was carried out within the framework of the Environmental Monitoring UrbanRegion Rotterdam which is done yearly by the Cooperative Body EnvironmentalMonitoring Urban Region Rotterdam. Within this body many regional public bodies areworking together to drawn up the annual regional monitoring report. In the past years notonly the health effects in the Rotterdam Area were monitored. The number of noisecomplaints in general and specific for aviation noise were also monitored, as well as thequiet areas and the numbers of houses that were built in areas with a higher noise burdenthan 55 dB(A) 24 hours average value.In 2006 the Noise Section of DCMR EPA contributed to this monitoring report with a newissue. An estimation of the depreciation of the house prices was provided and added to thereport. The methodology which was followed was based on the principle of hedonicpricing. The estimation showed us that the depreciation of the value of the houses wasabout 2 billion (€ 2.000.000.000) or € 3800 per dwelling. In 2007 and 2008 additionalsurveys will be carried out in cooperation with the Rotterdam Public Health Service. Otherinvestigations are planned to estimate the costs of lost space (useless for housing or othervulnerable objects).

1 INTRODUCTION

Speaking about Noise monitoring one might think that this paper is going aboutmeasuring Noise in the field nearby airports, noisy high- or railways or other major noisesources, but in this paper this is not the case. This paper goes into measuring the noiseindicators that are used to report the subsequence effects of Noise. There are a lot of varyingindicators which can be used like m

of exposed (quiet) area, length of acoustic barriers

Email address: henk.wolfert@dcmr.nl

alongside roads, length of constructed quiet road pavements, and amount of complaints. Allsorts of indicators like key performance indicators, process indicators and source indicatorsare used in the reports about the environmental situation and trends in the Rotterdam area. Inthis paper a brief glance will be given in the monitoring method that is carried in theRotterdam region.Rijnmond is the region around the city of Rotterdam and its harbour. Within theRotterdam area 18 municipalities are situated. DCMR EPA carries out the environmentaltasks for these 18 municipalities (including the city of Rotterdam) but also for the province of South Holland in this region. In this region about 1.2 million people are living and more than20.000 enterprises are active, varying from a bakery or a butcher to giant refineries andchemical industries such as the Dutch Anglo enterprise Shell as well. A lot of transhipment of containers and minerals takes place in the Rotterdam harbour. The Rotterdam harbour is thelargest harbour in Europe and one of the largest in the world. DCMR EPA noise sectionworks on noise caused by industry, road and rail traffic, airports, recreational activities,music, dance and sports events, building and construction works. More about our noisesection can be found at DCMR EPA’s website www.dcmr.nl . More about the harbour of Rotterdam can be found at www.portofrotterdam.comSince 1994 the provincial and local authorities in the Rotterdam area had already realisedthat joint monitoring of the regional environmental situation was essential to an effectiveenvironmental policy. Since then, thirteen MSR reports on the Rotterdam region have beenpublished. In the early years the environmental quality appeared to improve visibly. Morerecently, however, on balance no further progress has been made. The explanation for this isthat in the nineties, the ‘easy’ environmental problems were able to be solved throughstringent source policy; the initiative at that time lay with the major polluters. As aconsequence of this the difficult problems remained problems which were mostly caused bydiffuse sources. For example noise nuisance is caused, among other things, by road and airtraffic, and industry, while shipping traffic and road traffic are important sources of airpollution. Since there are usually a number of authorities responsible for tackling thesediffuse sources, effective cooperation between these authorities is a prerequisite.Thus within MSR the most important authorities in the Rotterdam region environmental fieldare represented. By jointly sketching an integral picture of the environmental situation in theregion in MSR, these authorities can also jointly take those measures which are necessary inorder to tackle the diffuse sources. The Rijnmond Regional Air Quality Action Programme isa good example of this. Special attention is devoted to road and shipping traffic, and privatehouseholds, as well as to industry.The goal of MSR is twofold. In the first place MSR aims at tracking the progress of environmental policy in the region and indicating new developments relating toenvironmental quality, free from value judgements. In this way MSR contributes to the policycycles of the authorities which work together in MSR. Administrators and their staff thusobtain information which enables them to place, evaluate and, if necessary, adjust theirpolicy in a broader context. On the basis of this information they can also formulate newpolicy or speed up its implementation. Where no verifiable policy objectives are available,indicators in any case perform a warning function so that timely adjustments are stillpossible. In the second place, MSR informs residents and the business sector about the stateof the environment in the Rotterdam region and its recent developments. In this way MSRfulfils the obligation that authorities have, in the framework of the Aarhus treaty, to supply

environmental information to their residents. Furthermore, MSR responds to the societal needfor transparent government.This paper only goes into the noise indicators that were reported over the past years.Special attention will be given to the reports of 2004 and 2006. In those reports specialinterest was given to Noise and Health (2004) and to Noise and the devaluation of houseprices in the Rotterdam area. This paper ends with a look ahead to the reporting activities of the year 2008.

2 NOISE INDICATORS2.1 Earlier reports

The first reports (2000 till 2003) comprised a lot of information about noise. Because theacoustic zoning of industrial areas had just been finished a lot of information was available toreport. Reported was the number of noise complaint that was registered by the CentralMonitoring Room of the DCMR EPA. Separate as well consolidated noise map with thenoise contours of the noise of industry, roads, railways and airports together were reported.The result of a survey among the citizens of the Rotterdam area that compared the annoyancecaused by noise, feelings of unsafely, stench and particulate matter was reported as well.

Figure 1: Combined Noise Map Rotterdam area

The Noise maps showed us that there was hardly a quiet place in the Rotterdam area to befound. The whole area was covered by a blanket of noise. The most important source wasroad traffic noise and this would increase more and more if mitigations stayed behind. Whencomparing the complaints addressed to noise with the complaints addressed to stench andParticulate Matter (PM) we see that noise complaints are increasing and the complaints aboutPM stays at the same level. For stench there is almost the same trend as for PM. The red linerepresent the noise complaints, de green line the stench complaints and the orange representthe PM complaints. The blue line stands for the total amount of complaints.