5 mobility challenges Mobility as a Service must address

Imagine that instead of owning the key that unlocks your own personal vehicle, you are handed a personal key to any given vehicle. This is exactly where the promise of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) lies — a seamless access point to the complete mobility spectrum. The whole idea can be seen not only as a promising concept for the end-user but also as an alternative to the private car that cities want to push out. As attractive as it may seem, the concept of MaaS also carries a lot of misconceptions. In a series of articles, we aim to dispel this fog with what we call the ‘MaaS Fundamentals’ that are the key to actually unjamming urban mobility. Welcome to the second episode of the series!

Teleology of MaaS

The car is still considered to be the most flexible option to get around seamlessly — it promises you empowerment to ride anywhere at any moment. But what if you try remembering the last time you were scouting for a parking spot? In those moments, car ownership can be compared to dragging around a rock shackled to your leg. This is precisely the reason why, in 2001, Bernd Meurer coined the notion of Mobility-as-a-Service, arguing that “ownership and use do not necessarily have to be one and the same”⁵.

Ford’s ad for their new SUV (2020)

Thus, even though this argument for flexibility is usually implicitly directed against public transport, as much as for owning a personal car (most recent example — Ford’s ad for their new SUV⁶), we cannot forget that public transport carries a significant volume of people every single day. For this reason, we decided to spend a lot of time learning as much as we could from public transport authorities (PTAs). And it seems that PTAs have become more and more convinced that MaaS is the adequate alternative to owning a car, promising even more expansive flexibility: if you were to have a personal master key to any transport option in your pocket, why would you ever rely only on one specific vehicle? This is further supported by ever-accelerating public and private tenders looking for software companies to provide working MaaS solutions. This excitement is nonetheless tainted with three extremely pervasive issues:

1. A significant amount of actors in the mobility industry are basing the necessity for MaaS in a causal relationship with the emerging sharing economy: if everything is now shared, why not also share transport? For us, this seems to be a slightly misguided approach, as a truly valuable solution has to have a clear reason to exist — a proper vision and clear objectives.
2. Most academic, public policy or purely corporate marketing material constantly try to reduce MaaS to a transport-agnostic consumer-facing mobile app that enables riders to book & pay for their rides in a single environment, which is either of a private, public, or hybrid nature. On face value, these criteria sound reasonable until you consider how different mobility modes can be compared to each other: an electric bike is more sustainable than a petrol car, and a full bus is more effective than a taxi ride. This suggests that certain modes of transport should be prioritized and incentivized.
3. In addition to this, continuous debates directly stifle the immediate and impactful development of MaaS solutions. Industry players, public transport authorities, politicians, and even academia disagree if we should immediately start with an intercity, intracity, regional, nationwide or even global MaaS solution and if we should keep such a solution closed, or make it completely or somewhat open.

Comparing solutions, without first going over and prioritizing the actual challenges these solutions ambition to solve, is a futile endeavor. The following elements constitute the key challenges that any MaaS solution is expected to address:

• Sustainability: prioritizing walking and cycling is a strategic public health objective that is difficult to achieve in cities where breathing has become increasingly problematic and even lethal,
• Safety: private mobility providers are rarely intrinsically incentivized to ensure safe movement, and pedestrians, as well as cyclists, are carrying most of the burden in trying to avoid traffic accidents,
• Equity: mobility networks embed inequities — less well-off people rely on public transport while more affluent people revert to private options or hail rides, thus adding to the network congestion,
• Effectiveness: mobility networks exist to help people and goods move around, and the lower the volume of passengers and parcels vehicles can carry, the less effective such mobility networks become,
• Connectivity: people from underserved areas rely on private or sporadic alternatives to access the network, thus significantly reducing their ability to take a full part in the urban community life.

All of these challenges suggest that MaaS is much more than just another app in your already overloaded phone screen. If a city is really looking to provide a master key to access any transport option for their residents as a legitimately better alternative to owning a car, this key has to make urban mobility networks more sustainable, effective, equitable, connected, and safe. This also implies that the main challenges now lie in the urban centers, which does not mean that rural areas or intercity traveling is not important. On the contrary, these use cases have many more significant challenges that would require completely new solutions to supplement urban, intracity MaaS.

These issues and the current understanding of MaaS do not go hand in hand, which is why we think the definition of MaaS and its understanding should be broadened up and unpacked into a clear developmental roadmap.

Stay tuned for episode 3, coming to you very soon!

• Martynas Gudonavičius, CEO & Co-Founder

[5] Meurer, B. (2001) The Transformation of Design, in Design Issues, vol. 17, no. 1.
[6] Ford Escape 2020 adverstisement (2020), accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8yqp8W_GBw