NETFLIX AND APPLE REVOLUTIONISED FILM AND MUSIC THROUGH SOFTWARE. THE ECONOMICS OF SOFTWARE AND THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSPORT ARE VERY DIFFERENT
This is the first in two posts about “Mobility-as-a-Service”; the highly fashionable transport concept. Almost everywhere you look, you find people saying that MaaS is going to be the saviour of public transport.I’m going to stick my neck out and say that MaaS is (when taken literally) flawed and (when re-defined, as it often is) a distraction.
WHAT IS MAAS?
One problem with MaaS is that no-one seems entirely clear what it is. I recommend you google it and open five different reports. All start with several pages attempting to nail down the definition. That’s never a good sign. Micromobility, autonomous vehicles, open data, road pricing and other genuinely transformational solutions don’t need pages of definitions.
The reason why it’s so hard to pin down is that the original idea (which is admirably simple) is also flawed. Rather than accept that it’s flawed and move on, proponents have then worked to reframe the idea until it reaches a place that feels like it can work. Even if that place is a long way from where the idea started.
THE FATAL FLAW
Mobility-as-a-Service started out with the simple idea of replicating the success of Software-as-a-Service. Software-as-a-Service has been one of the great tech success stories of recent decades, in which a whole bunch of different products that previously had to be bought as one-offs can now be accessed via simple monthly subscriptions.
- Once upon a time, you needed to rent films individually. Now you just pay for a monthly Netflix subscription.
- Once upon a time, you needed to buy a finance system. Now you just pay for a monthly Xero subscription.
- Once upon a time, you needed to buy singles. Now you just pay for a monthly Spotify subscripton.
At one point in the early 2010s, some smart-alec said “Why can’t mobility be like Spotify? With Spotify, you pay one monthly subscription for all the music you want. Why can’t you just pay for one monthly subscription for all the transport you want?” That is the true definition of MaaS. And it’s a brilliant idea. Genuinely. Consumers would love it, and if it ever happened, it would revolutionise transport. But in this article I’m going to point out that much of it is already happening (e.g. the Travelcard) and the bits that aren’t happening are almost impossible to achieve.
This is because this original idea of MaaS is based on a fundamental misunderstanding, as mobility is not software.