A Web-based Housing and Mobility Cost Calculator for Salzburg

In the past decades, the development of housing estate and mobility behaviour in the Alpine space has been characterised by growing land use and landscape fragmentation on the one hand, as well as increasing commuting distances and motorised individual traffic on the other hand. Both processes mutually influence each other, since the location of housing is a central determinant for everyday mobility requirements. However, despite several interdependencies, housing decisions are generally made without comprehensive knowledge about their far-reaching implications. The work at hand presents the working steps to develop a calculator for private households in the province of Salzburg. The Web-based tool is meant to both indicate the impact of housing and mobility decisions on a household's expenditure, and to illustrate the influence of housing locations on mobility opportunities. Therefore the transparency of induced cost structures shall be fostered, and the awareness of households on existing interdependencies shall be raised. In the end, this shall contribute to more long-sighted housing and mobility decisions, strengthening structurally integrated areas with less traffic and more environmentally sound modes of transport. As a result, the calculator was made available on-line and free of charge at www.moreco.at/haushaltsrechner. In conclusion, it can be found that in the long run the share of mobility costs in a household's budget gains importance. Cheap land prices tend to face high mobility costs and hence overall costs may become more expensive in peripheral regions, compared to well integrated locations. The tool shall contribute to illustrate this finding, breaking the fixation on pure land prices in housing decisions.