COMPARISON OF COMMUNITY RESPONSES TO RAIL YARD, ROAD TRAFFIC, AND AIRCRAFT NOISE.

This paper examines the assumption that annoyance can be used as a summary measure of the adverse effects of noise, which is consistent for all noise sources. There are two parts to this basic assumption of community noise control efforts: first, that annoyance correlates well with noise level for most sources; and second, that the equations describing annoyance as a function of noise level are approximately the same for each source. This paper tests both parts of the assumption, using data on community response to three sources - rail yard, road traffic, and aircraft noise.