A GIS-based approach for the screening assessment of noise and vibration impacts from transit projects

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2006.06.010 Byline: Maged Hamed (a), Waleed Effat (b) Keywords: Environmental impact assessment; Model; Noise; Vibration; Gis; Transportation Abstract: Urban transportation projects are essential in increasing the efficiency of moving people and goods within a city, and between cities. Environmental impacts from such projects must be evaluated and mitigated, as applicable. Spatial modeling is a valuable tool for quantifying the potential level of environmental consequences within the context of an environmental impact assessment (EIA) study. This paper presents a GIS-based tool for the assessment of airborne-noise and ground-borne vibration from public transit systems, and its application to an actual project. The tool is based on the US Federal Transit Administration's (FTA) approach, and incorporates spatial information, satellite imaging, geostatistical modeling, and software programming. The tool is applied on a case study of initial environmental evaluation of a light rail transit project in an urban city in the Middle East, to evaluate alternative layouts. The tool readily allowed the alternative evaluation and the results were used as input to a multi-criteria analytic framework. Author Affiliation: (a) Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Giza 12211, Egypt (b) Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) North East Africa, Giza 12211, Egypt Article History: Received 2 August 2005; Revised 11 March 2006; Accepted 5 June 2006