On the 6th and the 7th of April a meeting of Working Group Noise of EUROCITIES was held in Gdansk. Venue of the meeting was the New City Hal in the centre of Gdansk. After a brief welcome by the interim-chairman Mr.Ronald de Jong all participants were welcomed by the representative of Gdansk, Mr. Maciej Lorek, head of the Environmental Department of the city of Gdansk. A special word of welcome was sent to the representatives of the city of Bydgoszs, mrs. Beata Kempa and Mr.Grzegorz Boron and to mr. Federico Saporiti from Turin. Due to a delay of the plane of the chairman some changes were made in the draft agenda. The draft agenda was approved by the members. During the following acquaintance round a brief overview about modified asphalt was given by mr. Saporiti. This type of asphalt was applied in Turin and the first experiences, according to mr.Saporiti are very hopeful. After this a round table was held and every member has been invited to bring new topics and the progress of preparing the second round of noise mapping on the table. Regarding to the report that was drafted by Dublin, the questionnaire about noise from large scale outdoor events, it was decided that a presentation should be done during the meeting of the Working Group Greening the Local Economy to be held in Zurich in May.
After the round table, the chairman of the Working Group Noise took over the meeting and started with the announcements from EUROCITIES office. During this point a slight change in the rules (regulation) was proposed by the chairman. Because the participants didn’t have a sufficient mandate it was decided that the proposal should be brought to the propound managers of each individual member. Another point was the proposal done by the city of Rotterdam about quiet tyres. This proposal is to produce noise maps, based on replacement of existing tyres by the New or Quieter Tyre on all vehicles or a share of the vehicles and, based on that map, to estimate the reduce of exposed people. This was already done by the city of Rotterdam, and the example showed that the reduction of exposed people is significant (28%). The proposal will be sent in a few weeks to all EUROCITIES cities and especially to the members of EUROCITIES’ Working Group Noise inviting them to join this initiative. Based on the outcomes of this exercise we could lobby for more better tyres, especially during the review of the tyre regulation which is foreseen in 2013. to be clear, this is one of the two proposals done by the city of Rotterdam. The other proposal is regarding the covenant on Better Tyres. This proposal was explained to the Mobility Forum which has met last week in Budapest. It will also be explained to the Green Procurement working group.
During the morning session a local broadcasting company was also present and some of the participants have been interviewed by the journalist of the local broadcast company. By the chairman the progress of CNOSSOS was reported. The WGN expresses her concerns about the poor progress that was made and also about the opposite attitude some MS have. Members were invited to complete the draft letter on this subject and which will be addressed to the European Commission and the members of the ENVI Committee of the European Parliament.
The signals received from the DG environment are a bit disappointing. It was concluded that the proposals done to improve the Environmental Noise Directive will not be embraced by the top of DG Environment. By our WGN a letter will be sent to the DG Environment to plea for more ambitions and we will refer to the report that was published by the WHO (Environmental Burden of Disease), see also below. WGN should be very disappointed if the END will not be improved.
By mr. Piotr Modiuszewski from the Technical University of Gdansk a presentation was done about the PERSUADE project. This project which has 7 partners is aimed to make further improvements in PoroElastic Asphalt. A first report about the progress of this project was published last week. If the durability of this type of asphalt could be improved then a huge pace could be made because the acoustical properties of this kind of asphalt are really promising! More information about this project can be obtained on the website of this project (www.fehrl-persuade.org), see elsewhere on this weblog.
After lunch an overview was given about the developments in traffic (technical, demographic and political) by the chairman of WGN. Special attention was given to the Brussels developments on quiet tyres, Emission Limit Values (ELV’s) of cars and trucks in relation to the CARS21 memorandum and the White Paper on Transport, which was published recently by the European Commission. In these papers some important developments are mentioned like the proposed reduction of the ELV’s for passenger cars and HGV. Reductions proposed to go up to 4 dB for passenger cars and 3 dB for HGV. Technological seen reductions could even be higher according to a former presentation of Heinz Steven (TüVNord) during the CALM network meetings. After this overview, a discussion in sub-groups took place followed by a plenary discussion. The outcomes of the discussion will be included in the Position Paper on Urban Transport.
The second day the just published report from WHO “Burden of Environmental Disease” was presented by Dr. Rokho Kim. The total loss of healthy life years expressed in DALY’s amounts at least 1 million per annum. Expressed in euro’s the annual costs amount € 75 million/a. Noise is the second on the ranking of lost healthy life years on the list of environmental factors. Only air pollution causes more DALY’s, about twice as much.
After the presentation of Dr. Kim we discussed about the role this report should play in near future. We defined a number of messages that should be addressed toward the local authorities and to the European Union. The outcomes of this report are very welcome to persuade the politicians that a more effective approach on noise is wanted/needed.
The next meeting of Working Group Noise will be held in October in Turin, see the column on the left hand side.