The future of urban sound environments: Impacting mobility trends and insights for noise assessment and mitigation

Abstract The degradation of the sound environment contributes significantly to the external costs of mobility and is an obstacle to the development of cities. Action plans aiming at fighting traffic noise often take a long time to reach mature implementation. Therefore, it is advantageous to envisage how societal and urban changes and associated changes in mobility practices will modify the urban sound environment of tomorrow. In this article, an interdisciplinary team of seven researchers, whose work focuses on different fields of acoustics and mobility, reviews the potential impact of ongoing mobility and society changes on sound environments. First, the team identified the trends dealing with urban renewal, societal changes and new mobility drivers that have the greatest influence on sound environments, and analyzed in detail. From this analysis, insights emerged for urban noise impact and innovative noise mitigation solutions in the light of improved assessment of the links between mobility and urban sound environments.