Abstract
The rapid emergence of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) into the transport sector’s lexicon has brought with it an air of expectation that suggests a future mobility revolution. This paper focusses on the user perspective and offers a deepening of socio-technical thinking about MaaS and its prospects. It first provides an examination of what is understood to date about MaaS in what is a new but rapidly evolving body of literature. This highlights the concept of MaaS as a ‘mobility system beyond the private car’ and the new centrality of a ‘mobility intermediary’ layer in that system. The paper then focuses and elaborates upon its contention that MaaS is neither new nor revolutionary but is rather an evolutionary continuation in terms of transport integration. Emerging from an era of unimodal travel information systems becoming multimodal and then integrated multimodal information services, MaaS is now about adding seamless booking, payment and ticketing to the integration offer. The paper puts forward a ‘Levels of MaaS Integration (LMI) taxonomy’ analogous to the level 0–5 SAE taxonomy for automation of road vehicles. This taxonomy, designed around the user perspective (including cognitive user effort), concerns operational, informational and transactional integration that it is suggested reflect a hierarchy of user need. From a synthesis of insights from the ‘pre-MaaS’ literature concerning choice making for travel and the role of information, a MaaS behavioural schema is provided to illustrate potential consideration and adoption of MaaS from the user perspective. In concluding, the paper considers what a user perspective reveals for the future prospects of MaaS and in particular for the mobility intermediaries.
Highlights
Mobility as a Service (MaaS) by name is in its infancy
We suggest that this is symptomatic of a mobility system beyond the private car in which varying degrees of integration exist across the mobility services, information services and transaction layer and with the mobility intermediary reliant upon all three layers
Corresponds largely to Level 3 in Sochor et al (2017), referred to as ‘integration of the service offer’ where elaborative commentary concerns provider and business perspectives, while here focus is upon user experience. https://www.moovel-group.com/en. This is rather different in focus to Level 4 in Sochor et al (2017) - referred to as ‘integration of societal goals’ - where it is assumed that MaaS should be shaped with appropriate actors so as to pursue a system-optimal mobility solution beyond only meeting the needs of individual users
Summary
Mobility as a Service (MaaS) by name is in its infancy. It is a “nascent phenomenon” (Smith et al, 2018). Success of MaaS is dependent upon a shift in behaviour away from reliance upon private car ownership (Mulley, 2017) towards using other modes (in combination) Further still it is dependent upon users valuing the mobility intermediary proposition as a medium through which to access and pay for mobility services, as opposed to accessing and paying for such services more directly for themselves. It includes a behavioural schema illustrating the consideration and adoption of any new MaaS offer from a user perspective.
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