Valuation of traffic noise abatement based on hedonic pricing models of the property market has traditionally measured the noise as the equivalent, or another average, level. What is not captured in such a noise indicator is the maximum noise level of a vehicle passage. In this study, we incorporate the maximum noise level in the hedonic model letting the property price depend on both the equivalent noise level and the maximum noise level. Hedonic models for both rail and road noise are estimated. Data consists of characteristics of sold properties, property-specific noise calculation, and geographical variables.

We use the hedonic approach to estimate the marginal willingness to pay (WTP) for maximum noise abatement where we model the effect as the maximum noise level subtracted with the equivalent noise level. Furthermore, we control for the equivalent noise level in the estimations. The estimated results show that including the maximum noise level in the model has influence on the property prices, but only for rail and not for road. This means that for road we cannot reject the hypothesis that WTP for noise abatement is based on the equivalent noise level only. For rail, on the other hand, we estimate the marginal WTP for the maximum noise level and it turns out to be substantial. Also, the marginal WTP for the equivalent noise levels seems to be unaffected by the inclusion of the maximum noise level in the model. More research of this novel topic is requested though.