The use of Tranquility Rating for urban spaces

The Tranquility Rating coefficient (TR) is a tool proposed for assessing the quality of urban green areas, which considers both visual and acoustic aspects. This paper aims to verify how the proposed TR coefficient works for the assessment of the audiovisual quality of a typical urban space in a vicinity of an arterial road. Three different versions of the same urban space are considered: loud and visually unappealing (current state), quiet and visually unappealing (after considerable traffic reduction), and visually appealing and quiet (after redesigning). The values of noise levels required for the calculation of TR are taken from the noise maps based on the in-situ measurements, and the values of the percentage ratio of the features which are natural or man-made but contained within the visual scene (NCF) are taken from a survey conducted in the research. The results show that for the urban areas, even with very low noise levels, the TR is described as “unacceptable”. This may indicate the need for introducing an amendment for TR to be used in typical urban areas.