[JorgeGT]

If you live in the EU, there's an European directive making noise maps mandatory: Member States shall adopt the measures necessary to ensure that no later than 30 June 2012, and thereafter every five years, strategic noise maps showing the situation in the preceding calendar year have been made and, where relevant, approved by the competent authorities for all agglomerations and for all major roads and major railways within their territories. END Directive (2002/49/EC)

There's a basic online viewer here: http://noise.eea.europa.eu/ but the GIS data is available here: http://cdr.eionet.europa.eu/

[lazyjones]

Unfortunately, legislation in some countries (at least 1, Austria) prohibits use of this data for commercial projects.

[ChuckNorris89]

Is it me or is Austria most paranoid country in Europe in regards to privacy?

IIRC, dash/helmet cams are also not allowed here due to privacy, which is crazy. A friend of mine was hit by a car while riding his bike and now has to fight the driver in court to get justice since there were no witnesses. A cam would have made a night/day difference.

[fit2rule]

Its a really weird rule, but Austria is full of weird rules.

First - its not true that you cannot use a dash cam. You just can't ever publish any media from that camera that might be used to identify a person - even in a court of law, when attempting to prove your own innocence.

You can use a dash cam to record your journey - but if you ever show the video to anyone, you must render anyone in that video un-identifiable, and that goes for license plates as well.

Also, a common misconception among Austrians is that you need permission to film someone in public. This is not true - no such permission is required, and you can record anyone in any public space, any time you want.

You're just not allowed to use that recording to identify someone, nor for commercial purposes - without express permission.

[oh_sigh]

Wait - so if a person runs a red light and crashes into my car, I can't use dashcam footage from my car showing that I had a green light and the other drive ran the red light?

[fit2rule]

You can, as long as you don't identify the driver and use the evidence only to illustrate your own action.

Crazy, isn't it? But nobody said Austrian law is sane.

[ChuckNorris89]

If you can't identify the guilty driver how does the video footage help your case then?

No offense to anyone, I like privacy focused societies but taking it to such an extent that it ends up protecting the wrong doers is the society equivalent of selling your liver to buy a kidney.

[rocgf]

I do find that a bit weird myself, but I'm happy to see that there are countries that still value privacy. Towards the other side of the spectrum, you get countries like the UK where you are being filmed pretty much everywhere you go, yet the police mostly shrugs when you report a crime that was caught on video.

[JorgeGT]

Ah, that's unfortunate indeed. In my city that data is CC-BY 4.0.