Mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) has been a much vaunted concept since it first emerged in the mid-2010s, promising a one-stop shop for transport needs. Helsinki, Antwerp and Berlin have been early pioneers in the field, but the idea has yet to take off on a wider scale.
On the sidelines of the Cities Today Institute’s City Leadership Forum in Madrid, Antwerp’s Vice-Mayor for Mobility Koen Kennis said MaaS can still deliver – but finding a balance of power is crucial. “MaaS can be a solution – whereby residents don’t have to open each [mobility] app to access a service,” he commented.
Antwerp takes a market-based approach towards MaaS – rather than promoting just one app, the municipal government works with companies to create different services that meet users’ needs more precisely. The city currently has three primary MaaS providers – Whim, Skipr and Olympus Mobility. They operate across several models – including business-to-business and business-to-customer – and cover all public transport, bikeshare, e-scooter and carshare services.
“I don’t think cities have to take the lead [on providing MaaS] – private companies can organise this, but they have to have open access to all the different suppliers of mobility solutions, starting with public transport of course.”
Looking at who ultimately controls the MaaS ecosystem, Kennis acknowledged the need for some kind of overarching authority, and pointed towards Finland as an example. In 2017, the Finnish national government passed legislation requiring all transport providers – both private companies and public transit authorities – to share data with one another and enable other parties to sell their trips.
“I think we have to have legislation on what needs to be done, that operators have to deliver the data, but also the need for an agreement on collaboration that stays within GDPR law,” Kennis added. “This could be a government director of all mobility solutions, deciding what’s coming in, what’s not coming in and asking ‘how do we regulate this?’.
“They would be responsible for looking at the different MaaS solutions and saying ‘ok, this one is fit for our city or region, but this one doesn’t have enough solutions in its app or is making choosing services difficult’. “I hope that in the future we will have a few different MaaS applications in Europe, operating in every city.”
New projects
Several new MaaS projects have sprung up since the pandemic, as cities look to reduce car use. The trial phase of a project in Turin, Italy is set to conclude this month and has already received positive feedback from participants.