SPB and CPX results of rubberized surfaces in the italian urban and extra-urban context

Road traffic is the main noise source in urban context and a road surface with low emission characteristics is one of the most applied solutions for noise mitigation actions. Road pavement incorporating rubber (also known as rubberized surface) is a solution often applied all over the world and it has the great environmental benefit of recycling the scrap tires. In Italy the rubberized technologies have been introduced quite recently and some experimental installations have been acoustically studied in the last years. These experimental surfaces have been laid on extra-urban road and exposed to the wear due to the real traffic, in order to verify the time durability of the noise mitigation action too. In this work, data obtained from both Close Proximity method and Statistical Pass-By measurement sessions carried out on some rubberized experimental surfaces are shown. Results show clearly that the rubberized surface can be an efficient mitigation action also in the Italian context. Anyway, in some cases here analyzed the lowering of the emission level was almost negligible and this could be blamed to binding technical skills required by the rubberized surface technology but not perfectly complied during the installation.