Mobility as a service (transport)

Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) refers to a paradigm shift in personal transportation in which travelers use services for transportation, rather than using personal vehicles such as cars. This shift is fueled by a myriad of innovative new mobility service providers such as ride-sharing and e-hailing services, bike-sharing programs, and car-sharing services as well as on-demand "pop-up" bus services. On the other hand, the trend is motivated by the anticipation of self-driving cars, which put in question the economic benefit of owning a personal car over using on-demand car services, which are widely expected to become significantly more affordable when cars can drive autonomously.

This shift is further enabled by improvements in the integration of multiple modes of transport into seamless trip chains, with bookings and payments managed collectively for all legs of the trip. Travel planning typically begins in a trip planner. For example, a trip planner might show the user that they can get from A to B using: train-bus combination or taxi-train combination. The user would choose their preferred trip based on cost and time and convenience. At that point any necessary bookings (calling a taxi, reserving a seat on a long-distance train) would be performed as a unit, and payments managed too. It is also widely envisaged that this service should allow roaming, that is, the same end-user app should work in different cities, without the user needing to become familiar with a new app or to sign up to new services.

It is expected that MaaS will be associated with a decline in car ownership. This is one of the aims of MaaS, and this is borne out by the Ubigo trial Gothenburg during which many private cars were deregistered for the duration of the trial.

Monthly subscription vs pay-as-you-go

The concept then divides into 2 variants:

The Monthly subscription model is modelled after mobile phone plans. Users would pay a monthly fee and for that they would get e.g. unlimited travel on urban public transport plus a fixed number of taxi kilometers. The Monthly subscription model envisages a well-funded commercially operated "MaaS Operator" which will purchase transport services in bulk and provide guarantees to users. The only time this model has ever been tried was the Ubigo trial in Gothenburg.^[1] It is not necessary that the operator include all forms of transport, just enough to be able to provide reasonable guarantees. The MaaS operator will be able to use market power to get good prices. In particular a MaaS operator might be able to solve the problem of overcapacity in the taxi industry - e.g. in Helsinki, taxi drivers are waiting for a customer 75% of the time, and 50% of kilometers driven are driven without a customer paying. A MaaS operator might be able to solve this problem by paying salaries to taxi drivers, through existing employers, and guaranteeing them a certain level of income.

The Pay-as-you-go model represents the world we're more familiar with, whereby each leg of the trip (each train trip, taxi trip etc) has its own price, set by the transport service provider. In this world, the apps see themselves more like search engines, seeking to draw all transport service providers into the one ecosystem, so that users don't need to check other apps to confirm that they are in fact being given the best trip suggestions. Many cities have cards which pay for intermodal public transport, including Vienna^[2] and Stuttgart^[3] but none yet include taxis/on-demand buses in the service.

Both models have similar requirements in terms of needing trip planners to construct optimal trip chains, and technical and business relationships with transport service providers, e.g. a taxi booking/payment API and e-ticketing e.g. QR codes on urban buses and metros.

History

The concept first arose in Sweden. A well-executed trial was conducted in Gothenburg (Goteborg) under the monthly subscription model.^[4] The service was well received however it was discontinued due to lack of support at the government level for 3rd party on-selling of public transport tickets.

The idea then gained widespread publicity through the efforts of Sampo Hietanen, CEO of ITS Finland, and Sonja Heikkila, then a Masters student at Aalto University,^[5] and the support of the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communication .^[6]

By the time of the ITS Worldwide Congress 2015 in Bordeaux, Mobility as a Service was on everyone's lips,^[7] and the Mobility as a Service Alliance was formed. ^[8]

The EU-funded "Mobinet" project^[9] has laid some of the groundwork for MaaS, e.g. pan-european identity management of travellers, and payments, and links to trip planners.

Autonomous cars

As the development of the autonomous car accelerates the ridesharing company Uber has announced that it plans to transition is app to a fully autonomous service and aims to be cheaper than car ownership.^[10]

Analogy to Service Economy

The Service Economy refers to the relative importance of services in product offerings. Rather than selling goods, more and more companies offer the same value via services. Famous examples of this transformation are GE's power-by-the-hour, where GE started to sell jet engine thrust by renting out jet engines to airlines rather than selling them, and Xerox's print services, where Xerox started to rent out printers complete with service plans that including toner and paper delivery, rather than selling the printer. It was found that these services better served customer needs, as they more directly sold them what they needed (propel their aircraft, or print documents), rather than giving them the means to fulfill their needs themselves at the added expense of having to maintain the product needed to do so.

In the consumer space, this trend is sometimes referred to as Service as a product.

References

External links

• Popular summary from the ESP Group
• Mobility-as-a-service: Turning transportation into a software industry