What is Mobility as a Service (MaaS)?
The vast growth of urban population requires innovative mobility solutions
Urbanisation, combined with the overall growth of the world population, is expected to add another 2,5 billion people to cities, consolidating 68 percent of all humans to live in dense areas by 2050 (United Nations, 2018). Accordingly, the global demand for inner-city mobility is expected to double by 2050 (Van Audenhove et al., 2018), confronting cities with immense challenges. Existing traffic infrastructure is reaching its limits and urbanites’ travel needs have become more complex.
In order to fully understand how urban mobility is developing under the mentioned circumstances, we will go in depth on the following aspects.
First, we illustrate how business models within the urban mobility market are transforming. Second, we look at the precise definition of the buzzword(s) “Mobility-as-a-Service”. Third, we elaborate on where unu is placed in the MaaS ecosystem.
Business models in the mobility market become more service orientated
In the past, automotive manufacturers dominated the transportation industry with business models mainly designed to develop, manufacture at scale, and sell vehicles. On average, every second European inhabitant owns a car today, whereas 95% of the time the vehicles are unused and block limited city space (ACEA, 2017; Morris, 2016). As many people commute alone, the utilisation of vehicles is highly inefficient. This results in dense and chaotic traffic, which is nerve-racking and frustrating for everyone involved.
But not only does the demand for travel increase, customers’ mobility habits also become more sophisticated. People now expect a seamless travel experience tailored to their needs, so request fast, reliable, and convenient mobility solutions in order to get from point A to point B. To meet these challenging demands, players within the mobility industry have been focusing on adapting their business models towards a more service-oriented approach.
Opposed to manufacturing and selling vehicles, numerous companies aim to sell the service around mobility products in order to target customers’ needs more accurately. Indeed, city dwellers are more and more willing to pay for the use of a vehicle than for ownership. This trend does not exclude the scooter market. Whereas the concept of renting vehicles has been around for decades, it particularly took off through algorithmic travel-data optimisation and the transition from station-based to free-floating models (Van Audenhove et al., 2018). Examples of such free-floating scooter sharing services are Coup, eCooltra or Revel. But not only do individual businesses adapt their operations, the whole market is experiencing a reformation.
The key factor of MaaS is to integrate different transportation means
What does Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) mean? One may take it in the literal sense and immediately think of mobility service providers such as DriveNow, Coup or other players of the sharing economy. Because that’s what they do, providing mobility as a service.
However, the concept of MaaS that has been evolving in recent years refers to a more holistic approach. MaaS essentially aims at combining all means of transportation and understands the transportation landscape as an integrated system rather than individual silos (Utriainen & Pöllänen, 2018). More specifically, “MaaS relies on a digital platform that integrates end-to-end trip planning, booking, electronic ticketing, and payment services across all modes of transportation, public or private” (Deloitte, 2017).
Let us illustrate this through an example: In order to get from point A to point B, e.g. the daily commute from your home to your workplace, you could start with a kick-scooter for the first mile to the metro station, continue with the metro, to then finally use the service of a bike-sharing operator for the last mile to the office. However, you either book one ticket for the entire journey via one platform on a pay-as-you-go basis or you prepay for trips on a subscription-based pricing model. The platform operator then takes a commission and distributes the revenue amongst the utilized mobility operators.
Car ownership is the biggest enemy
One ultimate goal of MaaS is to render the initially explained inefficient car (or other vehicle) ownership obsolete, by offering city dwellers numerous alternatives for inner-city trips. Instead of a costly extension of traffic infrastructure, MaaS tries to make more efficient use of the existing private and public transportation infrastructure. In that sense, MaaS can help to solve the mobility challenges of urbanisation, by offering an integrated mobility package. But this is not only positive for the urban population. Convincing urbanites of abandoning their own cars to use mobility services is a very promising opportunity for organisations in the mobility space. Projections suggest a market worth of $ 600 billion in the United States, European Union and China by 2025. Others have projected that the global market for MaaS will exceed $ 1 trillion by 2030 (Pojani and Sipe, 2018).
This does not remain unnoticed by sharing operators all over the world, that start to extend their existing fleets with other vehicle types in order to offer their customers a multi-modal travel experience as embodied by the concept of MaaS.
Now let’s take this market development to explain how unu fits into the MaaS ecosystem.
unu aims to be an essential part(ner) of the MaaS ecosystem
To avoid any confusion, unu will currently not provide a digital platform integrating multi-modal travel options as defined by the recently developed concept of MaaS.
However, we are aware that we are part of a large ecosystem and believe in the benefits of the integration of multiple transport means and the shared use of vehicles, as envisioned by the concept of MaaS. It will eventually allow citizens of dense urban areas to be fully connected to all parts of their city. This is aligned with our vision to create the best mobility solutions that enable urbanites to embrace the full potential of urban life.
unu contributes to shared mobility
With this clear vision in mind, unu is now at the beginning of a new business era. We keep selling our scooters to individuals in order to provide them the ideal vehicle for their daily urban life. In addition, we now embrace the literal meaning of providing mobility as a service, embodied by our new product. The new unu scooter is fully cloud-connected and built for sharing purposes, making it the ideal vehicle for both upcoming and existing vehicle sharing operators.
Moreover, we are working hard to offer a complete package to our sharing partners. By supplying both including the scooter as the hardware product and the relevant sharing software such as fleet management applications, we aim to establish ourselves as a valuable partner in the shared mobility market.
unu contributes to multi-modality
The scooter itself comes out of the factory with built-in IoT modules, meaning that it is instantly connected to the unu cloud and thus effortless to integrate into any existing software infrastructure. This makes it easy for vehicle sharing operators to extend their existing fleets with electric scooters and to offer their customers a multi-modal travel experience.
As a consequence, we are able to contribute to both key trends incorporated by MaaS: Shared mobility and multi-modality. We are excited to jointly work with our partners towards the common goal of the MaaS ecosystem: to reduce car ownership and to create a more efficient and enjoyable urban transport.
As always, we’re happy to keep the discussion going through any critiques or additions you may have, so please do not hesitate to get in touch. We believe our insights should be like the future of mobility: shared!
This article is published by unu. Find out more about what we offer by visiting share.unumotors.com
