Estimating leisure noise in Spanish cities

• The main reason of leisure noise is people shouting in the street.
• A procedure to act has been defined to manage leisure noise problems.
• The proposed model allows to predict the noise level by knowing the number of leisure places.
• The soundwalker technique gives accurate results to diagnose leisure areas.
• Solutions to be adopted by the City Councils should be focused on the people and on reducing the density of leisure places.

Noise pollution is a great environmental problem in big cities. In particular, the leisure noise is one of the most significant problems during the night period and the responsible of a growing number of complaints and sleep disturbances from population.For that reason, with the aim of approaching an analysis on spatio-temporal evolution of the leisure noise, some areas with leisure activity as main noise source was sampled. With these results, a protocol to address an appropriate action against leisure noise problems is put forth. This procedure explains how to diagnose a leisure area or predict the noise levels inside these areas. Therefore, the proposed procedure could help taking better solutions in order to reduce the impact of leisure noise on the exposed population.