The MaaS Effect on the Business of Transport

MaaS Appeal: The Business Case for Mobility Services

Click here to view MaaS Appeal report

Andrew Pickford, Director of Infrastructure and Transport Advisory Services, MVA Hong Kong Ltd and Martin Higgitt, Market Director Sustainable Travel and Transport, SYSTRA Ltd

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) provides new opportunities to simplify travel planning and the provision of transportation services. It is likely that there will be as many different implementations of MaaS as there are clusters of transportation service providers that compete or co-operate to deliver high quality door-to-door travel needs. Delivering MaaS requires service integration, not only a comprehensive choice of transport operators but a coherent orchestrated group of service providers that are efficient, commercially viable and increasingly aligned with sustainability objectives. Removing wastage by providing capacity where and when needed, at predictable service levels and arrival times, underpins MaaS. Furthermore, if the enablers of co-operation are assured - such as through the standardisation of data exchange, interoperable ticketing, de (or re-) regulation and government leadership to encourage new organisational models - then this is where we will find the business case for MaaS. The current search for the business model for MaaS is underpinned by deep analytics of existing multimodal operations and an understanding of user preferences – areas where Systra is investing significantly internationally.

Depending on the level of regulation, organisational architectures could range from bilateral peer-to-peer relationships supported by an equally simple bilateral agreement on cost sharing, to multilateral, centralised governance models – and everything else in between. Each approach will have its own merits, and simple models could evolve towards more complex organisational structures that are aligned with conventional integrated multi-modal transport schemes. Requesting a trip that involves collection from home and ending 200 miles away doesn’t need much more than two service providers that can align their capacity for me, with one booking. Simple. Profitable. Efficient. But is this scalable?

To capture the potential organisational relationship that may arise, SYSTRA has developed a MaaS Reference Model. This does not imply that MaaS is all-seeing and pervasive, but it does assume that a MaaS implementation will need to contain all roles: a User, a Service Provider, a Regulator and a Mobility Operator (MO). A bus operator may fulfil two roles: Service Provider and MO role – or, alternatively a small PT operator may be willing to migrate parts of its operation that would be associated with ticketing and CRM to an MO to participate in a MaaS scheme.

Based on the Reference Model, the presentation will explore different organisational relationships, the potential distribution of benefits and the potential for economies of scale. Several use cases will be described and recommendations for enabling regulation will be proposed to enable the business case(s) for MaaS to be explored in practice. Examples of MaaS-related projects underway in which SYSTRA is participating in Europe and Asia will be presented, including user behaviour studies and MaaS scheme designs.