Traffic Noise Pollution on the Sahloul Road Segment in Sousse City—Tunisia

Road traffic noise is a major environmental concern, due to the continuous development of transportation systems. This problem is considered as a serious nuisance that accentuates social inequalities and can even depreciate the value of certain properties located near the sources of traffic noise. This work presents a study of road noise propagation emitted by a high-traffic road axis located at Sahloul region in the governorate of Sousse—Tunisia. Current analysis is based on two evaluations techniques. The first is based on the evaluation of the level of service (LOS) according to the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM). The second is based on the measurement of road noise level. The traffic data are collected by a video camera, while the instantaneous sound pressure level is measured by a programmable instrument sound level meter of type TES-1352H. All measurements were done during the working days of one week from 6 am to 6 pm under stable weather conditions. The main results obtained show that the road noise level increases with increasing vehicle flow rate especially at the peaks hours. Furthermore, the comparison between transportation noise models shows that the French CSTB model performs better than the other models when applied to the real site. Compared to the measurement data, the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) for the CSTB model is equal to 1.49, which is the lower RMSE compared to the other predictive models.