Spatial assessment of the attributable burden of disease due to transportation noise in England

Noise pollution from transportation is one of the leading contributors to the environmental disease burden in Europe. We provide a novel assessment of spatial variations of these health impacts within a country, using England as an example.

We estimated the burden of annoyance (highly annoyed), sleep disturbance (highly sleep disturbed), ischemic heart disease (IHD), stroke, and diabetes attributable to long-term transportation noise exposures in England for the adult population in 2018 down to local authority level (average adult population: 136,000). To derive estimates, we combined literature-informed exposure-response relationships, with population data on noise exposures, disease, and mortalities. Long-term average noise exposures from road, rail and aircraft were sourced from strategic noise mapping, with a lower exposure threshold of 50 dB (decibels) L_den and L_night.

40 %, 4.5 % and 4.8 % of adults in England were exposed to road, rail, and aircraft noise exceeding 50 dB L_den. We estimated close to a hundred thousand (∼97,000) disability adjusted life years (DALY) lost due to road-traffic, ∼13,000 from railway, and ∼ 17,000 from aircraft noise. This excludes some noise-outcome pairs as there were too few studies available to provide robust exposure-response estimates. Annoyance and sleep disturbance accounted for the majority of the DALYs, followed by strokes, IHD, and diabetes. London, the South East, and North West regions had the greatest number of road-traffic DALYs lost, while 63 % of all aircraft noise DALYs were found in London. The strategic noise mapping did not include all roads, which may still have significant traffic flows. In sensitivity analyses using modelled noise from all roads in London, the DALYs were 1.1x to 2.2x higher.

Transportation noise exposures contribute to a significant and unequal environmental disease burden in England. Omitting minor roads from the noise exposure modelling leads to underestimation of the disease burden.