Activity location and mobility costs

The paper fits into the general themes of land use - transport planning (Nuzzolo and Coppola, 2008a and 2008b) and accessibility (Geurs and van Wee 2004) in urban areas. It's widely recognized in academia the need for integration between mobility and land use policies in accordance with the objectives of environmental sustainability and quality of life in urban areas (Nuzzolo and Coppola, 2007; te Brömmelstroet and Bertolini, 2011). Furthermore, in recent years travel behaviours are changing in urban areas due to the increase in oil prices, the recession of Western economies, the resulting lack of financial resources for public transport subsidies. For this reasons, technicians and scientists are trying to find solutions in the short and long term to make existing transport system more efficient. In this sense the search for integrated solutions including systems engineering, transport and urban planning is a priority not only in the scientific debate but also in the operative field. Despite an extensive literature on the land use-transport interaction has been produced, simple tools for land - use transport integrated planning are not as much used; in particular tools that can support the choices of location of new activities in the definition of urban or regional plans are not widely applied (Hull et al. 2012). According to this premise, the goal of the work is to develop a tool to support the choices of activities location, which is based on accessibility and transport costs indicators. Assuming that one of the goal of integrated land use – transport planning is the minimization of generalized transportation costs (Nuzzolo and Coppola, 2010), in compliance with the objectives of environmental sustainability and quality of life, the tool computes the “access cost” of activities, providing an estimation in monetary terms of the advantages and disadvantages of locating an activity in a particular zone of the urban area; the tool provide