The idea of joined-up mobility services – an app managing all forms of transportation with common ticketing and route planning – was first mooted at least a decade ago and has roots going back a lot further.
Yet the concept has been long in gestation and is only now coming to fruition beyond trials, with various challenges still to be resolved. These include reconciliation with broader societal aims including environmental sustainability, integration between the respective transport systems and associated technological platforms and above all the thorny question of making it pay. These problems have dogged early mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) deployments even in China, where centralized control can be exercised with greater force and effectiveness than in most other countries.
Few would dispute the potential value of MaaS, which was first established in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, through a six-month public trial from November 2013 to April 2014, involving 173 adults and 22 children. This was delivered through a web-based smartphone app combining local public transport including trains and buses, car sharing, car rental, taxi and bike-sharing services in a single service. Participants paid a monthly subscription which has become established as one of the two payment options, akin to a season ticket, the other being pay-as-you-go for single integrated journeys.
The trial was backed by 24/7 technical support, which proved essential given the complexities and confusion involved even in a relatively modest metropolitan area by global big city standards of about 1m population. The service also tried out a sustainability incentive through bonuses awarded for greener choices such as bike riding, or to a lesser extent public transport.
This last point highlighted one of the challenges, incompatibility between the travel options in terms of cost as well as environmental toll, with taxis of course costing far more per unit distance than buses, bike hiring close to the bottom of the pyramid, while walking of course is free. This disparity contributed to the problem of revenue generation, which is compounded by the fact that fares paid have to be allocated highly disproportionately between the travel options.
But the main revenue issue lies with the services themselves, as early examples have struggled with business models. As with other app-based services, commissions are charged on rides, but the returns are small and there have also been tensions with providers of the various components, especially on the public transport side. Some transport companies want to provide their own apps for various reasons, including branding and desire to have control over data, or out of concerns over privacy.
However, these are largely teething troubles that will be overcome. In fact MaaS services promise to increase revenues and reduce costs over time through economies of scale and making more efficient use of the components, enabling greater resource planning through data analytics. A recent study in Helsinki confirmed the common experience of many taxi drivers by finding they spent 75% of their working time waiting for a fare, and that 50% of the distance driven generated no revenues because it was unpaid journeys such as returning from remote destinations, or travelling to pick up points. MaaS can reduce this wastage, as indeed ride hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft already have to a significant extent. But MaaS offers additional scope for addressing the problem, for example providing guaranteed base salaries to taxi drivers out of subscriptions, in return for discounted fares.
MaaS services and trials so far have tended to be local to individual cities, but to maximize their potential need to go national, or even international although the latter, embracing air travel, is some way off. China currently is most advanced with plans for a national MaaS scheme, having been working on this for almost four years since 2017 when Tencent expanded an existing QR code payments project to include buses and integrated route planning. This has since been extended to underground metro services and ferries, although not yet high speed intercity overground trains. This scheme then is still largely confined to 150 cities, serving about 150m people, almost 10% of the country’s population.
Meanwhile, several of the country’s other tech giants have stepped in, with Alipay’s app now starting to incorporate not just underground metro and buses, but also rail and domestic air services, as well as shared bikes. This itself highlights the challenge of fragmentation, since there are now several apps consumers can use, with some forms of transport only selectable and bookable via one. Clearly then, national MaaS can only achieve its potential through integration between different apps, all of which must be able to calculate and book complete routes between any two points incorporating all forms of travel.
At least the problem has been acknowledged in China and the first actions action taken to resolve it. The State Council Information Office in December 2020 released a white paper, ‘Sustainable Development of Transport in China’, calling for construction of a people-centered transport system incorporating MaaS but independent of individual companies.
Outside China one of the few attempts to establish a national scheme has just been launched in The Netherlands by Germany’s Siemens Mobility, in a joint venture with three local providers of MaaS apps, NS, RET and HTM. Called RiVier, the plan is to launch a countrywide MaaS platform in the last quarter of 2021 that will work with apps from any of those three providers. That will be a given, but success will depend on recruiting providers of all forms of transport nationally, including trains, trams, buses, shared bicycles, hire cars, scooters and taxis.
What has not been determined, which is a question for MaaS generally, is how pricing will be geared towards environmental objectives, as well as for streamlining transport management and alleviating congestion on rail as well as road.