Background

Choosing where to live significantly influences everyday mobility, energy use, and the associated costs. After all, most trips start or end right at your front door. Yet many residential location decisions lack concise information on mobility effort and mobility costs. People looking for housing often decide based on purchase price or rent and housing quality, without being able to assess long-term consequences such as higher mobility costs or environmental impacts.

In Austria, an energy performance certificate for buildings is mandatory and provides information on expected energy consumption, but it does not offer information on location-specific mobility aspects. This is where A++ comes in. The project develops an innovative, transferable method for assessing the mobility costs and mobility options of a residential location in the form of a static and dynamic mobility certificate that, analogous to the energy performance certificate, uses a color and letter scheme to make a location’s mobility quality visible.

Project Objective

A++ is an innovative contribution to sustainable mobility planning in Austria, developing and testing a standardized mobility assessment for residential properties for the first time. The goal is for the mobility certificate to promote residential locations with good access to public transit or high-quality conditions for walking and biking. This can support more sustainable travel mode choices among residents and contribute to reducing CO₂ emissions in the transportation sector.

Results

The project results will be prepared as recommendations for broad technical implementation and published in a freely accessible methods description.