New pilot · scaffold, real buildings, not yet scored

Unlocking Housing · EvoBioSys

Reichenau an der Rax: the Höllental gateway

A spa town at the mouth of a mountain valley, an hour from Vienna by rail — and a housing stock that may skew more toward seasonal villas than year-round homes. This page opens the question before the map has full answers: 9,687 real OSM buildings are loaded, none scored yet, plus one honest first estimate of who could actually reach the valley by car.

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Why this valley

Two railways, one still running

A summer-villa town

Reichenau an der Rax has long served as a summer-villa retreat for Vienna's upper classes, at the mouth of the Höllental valley, gateway to the Rax and Schneeberg massifs. That history leaves a pattern worth testing, not a proven statistic: housing built for seasonal and secondary use, not necessarily for people living there year-round.

One line closed, one still live

The Höllentalbahn, a narrow-gauge railway up the valley toward Hirschwang, closed to regular passenger service in 2010 — a car is now the primary way into the valley itself. That is distinct from Reichenau's own station: the Semmering–Rax line (the Südbahn, Vienna–Graz main line, via Payerbach-Reichenau) remains live.

Kaiserbrunn, honestly

"The Höllentalweg" has no single named way in OpenStreetMap, so the map anchors its valley-access estimate at Kaiserbrunn instead — a hamlet at the head of Höllental and the nearest real, road-accessible reference point. Stated here, not hidden: a methodological choice, not a fact about the trailhead's name.

The lowest-carbon home is the one that already exists. This pilot exists to find the ones sitting empty in a valley that already has a train line to the capital — even if the last mile still runs on a road, not rails.

What the map adds

A reachability estimate, honestly labeled

The new layer for this region is a 15-minute-by-car isochrone overlay anchored at Kaiserbrunn — a first, rough answer to "how far into the valley can you actually get."

It is a straight-line offline estimate: roughly an 8 km radius, assuming a 45 km/h average valley-road speed — not a routed isochrone. No live routing engine (Valhalla or openrouteservice) was reachable when it was built, so the shape on the map is a circle standing in for a proper drive-time polygon, not one.

Open the live map →

The map defaults to Reichenau an der Rax — Höllental on this domain. Use the Region dropdown to explore the Mur–Mürz corridor and other pilots.

A note on the numbers

What is true today

This region is new and intentionally under-claimed.

  • Real buildings, no vacancy scores yet. 9,687 OSM building footprints are loaded (1,499 tagged to Reichenau an der Rax proper; the rest fall in the surrounding Höllental/mountain terrain the pilot bbox also covers). No vacancy signal scoring has run on them yet — this is a boundary and a building set, not a result.
  • The isochrone is an estimate, not a route. The 15-minute-by-car overlay is a straight-line radius calculated offline (8 km at an assumed 45 km/h), not the output of a real routing engine. Actual drive time on a mountain valley road will differ from a circle.
  • Kaiserbrunn stands in for "the Höllentalweg." No OSM way carries that name, so the nearest real, road-accessible point was chosen as the honest reference.

Read this page as "a new pilot area opening up," not as a result. When scoring runs and the isochrone is re-derived from a real routing engine, this page will say so plainly — the same way the Austria corridor pilot now reports its 43,000+ scored buildings.