This paper describes the development of a model for assessing TRAffic Noise EXposure (TRANEX) in an
open-source geographic information system. Instead of using proprietary software we developed our
own model for two main reasons: 1) so that the treatment of source geometry, traffic information (flows/
speeds/spatially varying diurnal traffic profiles) and receptors matched as closely as possible to that of
the air pollution modelling being undertaken in the TRAFFIC project, and 2) to optimize model performance
for practical reasons of needing to implement a noise model with detailed source geometry, over
a large geographical area, to produce noise estimates at up to several million address locations, with
limited computing resources. To evaluate TRANEX, noise estimates were compared with noise measurements
made in the British cities of Leicester and Norwich. High correlation was seen between
modelled and measured LAeq,1hr (Norwich: r ¼ 0.85, p ¼ .000; Leicester: r ¼ 0.95, p ¼ .000) with average
model errors of 3.1 dB. TRANEX was used to estimate noise exposures (LAeq,1hr, LAeq,16hr, Lnight) for the
resident population of London (2003e2010). Results suggest that 1.03 million (12%) people are exposed
to daytime road traffic noise levels 65 dB(A) and 1.63 million (19%) people are exposed to night-time
road traffic noise levels 55 dB(A). Differences in noise levels between 2010 and 2003 were on average
relatively small: 0.25 dB (standard deviation: 0.89) and 0.26 dB (standard deviation: 0.87) for LAeq,16hr
and Lnight.