Delivering mobility as a service (MaaS) through a broker/aggregator business model

Abstract

Mobility as a service (MaaS) promises a bold new future where bundled public transport and shared mobility options (carsharing, ridesharing, bikesharing and microtransit) will provide consumers with seamless mobility on par with and exceeding that of private vehicle ownership. Whilst there is a growing body of work examining the market and end user demand for MaaS, there remains a limited understanding of the supply-side around new business models for delivering these integrated mobility services. Mobility broker/aggregator models have been proposed, but to date there exists no quantitative evidence to empirically test the conditions around which interested businesses might invest or supply in this new entrepreneurial model. In this paper, the idea of mode-agnostic mobility contracts [first proposed in Wong et al. (in: 40th Australasian Transport Research Forum (ATRF), Darwin, 2018)] are tested as the interface for bringing together specialised businesses as part of a future transport ecosystem. Data is collected from 202 organisations across 28 countries and mixed logit models estimated to identify the importance of contract attributes like modal mix, role of government, return on investment expectations, branding and equity contribution on respondent interest to partake in a MaaS business. Willingness-to-pay estimates are then devised to identify the potential value proposition of a mobility broker/aggregator to the business community.