Do vacationers in Spain have the right to silence?

 

Ms Mariló Jiménez Mateos
Jefe Servicio de Planificación
Subdirección General de Planificación
Dirección General de Carreteras
mdjimenez@fomento.es

Popular version of paper 1pNSb2
"From Strategic Noise Maps to Action Plan: Perspective of Spanish main roads"

The General Directorate of Roads of the Spanish Ministry of Public Works has been making the Strategic Noise Maps of roads. The whole national road network noise mapped for the Environmental Noise Directive has a length of 6.000 kilometres round. More than 450.000 people are exposed to levels of 55 dB during the night. That implies that action plan should be drawn up to reduce the population exposed to the noise. It is necessary to establish priorities in the proposals of the action plan.

In Spain there are roads near the coast. These areas present a special characteristic: there are houses called “second residence”, occupied only during the summer. Vacationers and tourists go to the villages near the beach to spend their holidays. These houses are occupied only during two or three months in the summer and are empty the rest of the year. It is not evident how this singularity has to be considered in the noise maps of roads. The strategic noise maps are presented as graphical plots or numerical data in tables of the number of people, dwellings, schools and hospitals that are exposed to specific values of the noise indicators. But it is not clear how to evaluate the people exposed to the road traffic noise when they do not live during the whole year.

For each noise map, conflict areas have been identified and solutions have been proposed based on the degree of exposed.
The degree of exposed is an index defined by the number of people exposed to a certain level during the night by kilometre of length. This is the reason why it is so important how the vacationers are counted.

A priority classified in high, medium or low, is established based on the degree of exposed and the effectiveness in the implementation of the solution.

The following steps are analyzing all the studies to establish global priorities, and defining a reference parameter to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed solution.