Impact of simulation-based traffic noise on rent prices

This paper is part of ongoing research on incorporating environmental aspects in microscopic integrated land use/transport models. The long-term goal is to add scenario sensitivity for noise emissions in a new modeling suite. Therefore, as a first step, the influence of simulated car traffic noise on real rent prices in the study area in question is analyzed and compared to existing studies. It is shown that modeled noise values from the transportation model are able to explain significant impacts on rent prices when using a hedonic pricing regression. When using noise as a continuous variable, price discounts of 0.4% per dB(A) are found. A discount of up to 9.6% for particularly loud locations is estimated when noise is used as a categorical variable. Care should be taken when controlling for accessibilities that may correlate with noise. The results are in line with results of previous studies and confirm that environmental aspects can and should be considered in integrated models.