What the road to MaaS really looks like. #BreakfastSeries
Five by Five’s #BreakfastSeries is a bi-monthly breakfast that brings industry leaders together to have open, honest conversations about topics disrupting their businesses and related fields. If you’d like to learn more or get involved, let us know: hello@fivebyfive.io.
2018 may be the year of the electric scooter, but there’s also a lot of talk around Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS). MaaS is a quickly growing market. It will grow to $358.35 billion by 2025, compared to $38.76 billion in 2017. The opportunity implied in this statistic alone appeals to multiple actors across several industries. To illustrate its importance on a more human level: In 2015, there were 900 million people worldwide over the age of 60. That number will significantly increase by 2050 with an expected 2.1 billion people. There is a need for MaaS players to address current and future social and infrastructural challenges.
Like every other trendy topic that spreads like wildfire, it’s hard to separate the truth from the buzz. We wanted to discuss MaaS during our #BreakfastSeries, so we teamed up with Xapix, a data platform driving digital mobility services, three panelists and 20 industry leaders. The discussion was led by Michael Fernandez (Co-founder, DRUST), Jean Marc Lazard (Co-founder, OpenDataSoft) and Pierre Musseau (Deputy of Urbanism and Architecture, City of Paris), and moderated by Xapix’s founder Christian Umbach and Five by Five’s founder Chloé Bonnet.
The discussion was lively and healthy, and we learned that there’s a great willingness to tackle MaaS head on, across several industries. But if that’s the case, why isn’t it happening quicker?
If only it were that easy. There are many things things that need to be reconciled and put in place for the road to MaaS to be clear. Here are our three key takeaways.
1. It’s never only about the technology. The feasibility of MaaS heavily relies on the politics.
Of course, the technology needs to be developed in order to make MaaS happen. But such a massive undertaking is always going to be about politics at its core. Politics is a subject that’s often taboo in business discussions, so it’s refreshing to talk about it with candor. Before the technology is even created, numerous limitations need to be addressed: government complicity, regulation, collaboration of actors, data ownership and accessibility, and ownership of streets.
2. Ignoring the social aspect of MaaS is ignoring the political aspect of it, too.
The political aspect is two-fold. It not only refers to more traditional topics that need to be agreed upon for MaaS to take off, but also the social concerns that MaaS will (or will not) respond to once it has taken off. The impact of a service on a population and who has access to that service — that’s implicitly political.
Increasingly, people in the startup ecosystem are becoming aware of the impact of services on society, leading to movements like Tech for Good. That means that developing and operating responsible and fair mobility solutions in the public interest is no longer reserved for public entities and policymakers.
If MaaS is about providing users with the most logical way to get from Point A to Point B, with the most efficient and cost effective methods, then it’s also up to tech companies to share that mentality and have public interest in mind.
3. The centralization of data would be a dystopian nightmare.
One sentiment everyone agreed on: avoid having a tech giant take the lead on carrying out MaaS. This scenario results in the centralization of information, which would force the one actor to open its data to others. The scary implication: one company would know and access all our data.
Having one company owning our data and regulating its use not only upsets the playing field, but will significantly impact areas like security and policymaking. At the hands of a single company, another breach like Uber’s could likely occur, but at an even bigger scale. A few years ago, hackers stole 57 million Uber driver and rider accounts, including names, phone numbers and email addresses. The company hid the data breach from the public for more than a year.
The solution is not yet known, but through the International Organization of Standardization (ISO), car manufacturers and regulators are coming together to decide how to make data available and presentable to avoid the standardization of data at the hands of one sole company. If successfully achieved, any data consumer will be able to go to Peugeot, Renault or Volkswagen to access data rather than relying on Google.
What’s next?
MaaS is not yet a fully fledged reality. But, we have examples of success from around the world that demonstrate its potential, as in the cases of San Francisco’s Clipper card and Hong Kong’s Octopus card. It won’t be simple or easy, but we’re far along enough to know what needs to be done to take MaaS even further. Next steps? Figuring out how different actors will best work together and address key concerns.
Feedback and comments are always welcome. If you’d like to chat about this IRL, feel free to reach out @MolinaAshli.
