The external cost due to railway noise in urban context

This research is focused on the valuation of railway noise externality, studied by the way of a pilot survey along a railway line’s section passing through the city of Turin. There, a sample of people has been inteviewed using a questionnaire focused to know the perceived disturbance and the willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid it, and, parallely, noise measurements have been carried out on the façades of the buildings where the interviewed people live. The results show that the noise level and the distance from the railway influence the disturbance, while the WTP is affected by the age, the income, and the education, but not by the noise level. Anyway, only the 28% of thesample is willing to pay and the average WTP per year and per household is very low, about 23 €. These results induce to extend the survey to a larger sample, also in other locations, and to try to use alternative methods to evaluate the social costs because the CV shows some reliability problems.