One of the most urgent problems in the modern urban areas is improving the quality of life through the optimization of urban development and the introduction of noise control measures in the face of high risks from the ever-increasing traffic and its noise impact. Cities and towns today are anthropological-natural complexes, with a special, to a large extent artificial, environmental management regime, which also implies its own specific methods of environmental engineering on a sustainable basis. The increasing problem of optimizing the building and the performance of noise control measures in the conditions of great number of vehicles and its noise impact is associated with a reduction in human health risk in the places of residence.
In Yaroslavl we conducted a pilot work on assessing the health risks from transport noise, effectively combining computer technologies and expert-analytical methods, we analyzed the assessment characteristics, the prospects and targets of the health risk study, and made an overall assessment of the human health risks as an effective state of environment indicator.
The results of the work showed that human health risk assessment of noise impact from vehicles helps to provide reliable justifications for selected strategies and environmental technologies, and to rank problem urban areas in order to update environmental and health-improving policy. Based on the studies carried out, a set of measures to reduce the impact of traffic noise and associated human health risks was proposed and justified in order to maintain the sustainable development of urbanized areas.