The paper reports the application of a novel approach to the assessment of the environmental impact of a road network concurrently with the development and testing of alternative roadway systems in a transportation planning study. While the application of traffic noise prediction models in assessing proposed new road facilities is now almost standard practice, most applications are restricted to a single route, or sometimes several alternative routes, for which need has been identified through network modelling. By contrast, the traffic noise modelling described here shifts the traffic noise evaluation several steps earlier into the planning process by assessing the noise impact of the of the network while it is still being developed, modelled and tested. An important feature of the procedure is that it predicts noise imission to dwellings rather than noise emission from the roadways to provide an unambiguous measure of impact. The procedure means that the road planner can routinely have immediate feedback, each time a new network is trialled, as to whether the network as a whole has adverse noise consequences and which particular links contribute to noise impact. The utility of this approach has been demonstrated in a practical study and it is recommended that it should be incorporated as standard practice in network modelling studies (A).
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