Urban railway traffic noise: Looking for the minimum cost for the whole community

Nowadays, railway traffic noise is acknowledged to negatively impact the wellbeing of the whole community, particularly in urban environments. Unfortunately, the traditional approach to support decision making in noise reduction intervention seems to start only from the compliance to the regulations in place, rather than from the identification of an optimal trade-off between the cost of the annoyance of the community and the cost of the intervention. An advanced approach is proposed, which starts from any annoyance due to traffic noise, and which aims at identifying an optimal trade-off by means of evaluation of the minimum cost for the whole community. A case study in a railway noise-affected urban cluster of Milan, Italy, has been performed, which is representative of any urban environment affected by traffic noise. The sensitivity analysis on the parameters of the approach (the size of the buildings; the level of railway traffic; the cost per square meter of the acoustic barriers) shows that the results are robust and reliable, and in the specific case a noise reduction of 15–25 dB is optimal for the community.