How do shared-street design and traffic restriction improve urban soundscape and human experience? —An online survey with virtual reality

Sound, together with other sensory impressions, contributes to the perceived quality of the global environment, and influences human experience of the place. This study investigates how shared-street design and traffic restriction, two widely used street management measures in urban areas, influence urban soundscape and human experience of the place, by asking: 1) Do shared-street design and traffic restriction improve the urban soundscape? 2) In different street management scenarios, how relevant is the soundscape to human experience of the place? By means of an online virtual reality application, two street-design scenarios and two traffic-restriction scenarios were simulated, and a task-based online survey was carried out to obtain participants' responses to the simulated virtual scenarios. The results show that shared-street design made the soundscape calmer and traffic restriction made the soundscape more pleasant. There was also potential interaction between shared-street design and traffic restriction that shared-street design might lead to changes in soundscape pleasantness depending on traffic restriction. High relevance of soundscape to human experience of the place is indicated, that peoples' perception of the acoustic environment and preferences for the acoustic environmental elements contributed to their preferences for places. However, the relevance might be relatively lower in shared-street scenarios.