Systematic review of municipal noise regulations in Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, there are three levels of governance (federal, provincial and municipal). We focus here on regulations related to environmental noise at the municipal level in the province of Quebec. We report on the main findings of a systematic review of 114 municipal regulations. The review covered regulations from 74 cities in Quebec, selected based on five criteria: size, geographical region, economic activity, proximity to major transportation infrastructure, and presence of outdoor recreational events. All official and up-to-date legal documents related to environmental noise were considered, including noise ordinances, rules of peace and order, and environmental protection acts. A qualitative analysis of definitions across documents indicates that environmental noise can be conceived as an acoustic phenomenon, an environmental pollutant, a public health concern, or a quality of life indicator. Other elements refer to the context in which it is experienced, in terms of time of day, zoning, activities and communities affected, as well as the agents producing noise. Furthermore, 35 municipalities include exposure limits in dBA mostly for overall sound level and 16 of them describe the measurement protocol. Most regulations rely on the energetic indicator LAeq,T, sometimes with corrections considering noise characteristics and emergence from the background noise. Despite variations across cities, limits typically center around: - 65 dBA outdoors and 45 dBA indoors for daytime, - 50 dBA outdoors and 40 dBA indoors for nighttime. The findings are discussed in light of best practices at the international level, including the World Health Organization guidelines. This research is funded by the Quebec ministries of Health (MSSS) and Environment (MELCC).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.067 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.026 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".