From mass transit to MaaS transit
Since 2016, an app called Whim has been in use in Helsinki to plan and pay for every mode of public and private transportation within the city — whether it’s taxi, public transport, a car service or a bike share. Anyone with the app can enter a destination, select their preferred way of getting there and go. Users can either pay as they go using a payment account linked to the service, or get a better deal by suscribing to a monthly plan and pre-paying for the service. The target is to offer an alternative to car ownership so affordable, convenient and appealing that users choose to give up their personal vehicles for city commuting (Helsinki’s aim by 2025). Many have named it “the Netflix of mobility” and it is the most advanced example we know of MaaS: Mobility as a Service, i.e. the integration of various forms of transport services accessible on demand with a single payment channel instead of multiple ticketing and payment operations.
Mass transit started during the first industrial revolution, with the construction of railways and fixed public transportation networks, carrying inhabitants to newly emerging cities. The arrival of the car in the 20th century led to the rise of suburbanization and decentralization of activities outside city lines. We are now living in the “digital age”, bringing new opportunities to make the existing transportation network far more efficient and user-friendly. The network is becoming much more tailored to precisely what users want, when they want it, and how they want it, through increased consumption choices and convenience. By adding more options into the supply side of transportation, MaaS could transform a relatively inflexible transportation system into one that is significantly more pliable.
MaaS programms offer to help their users meet their mobility needs and solve the inconvenient parts of individual journeys as well as the entire system of mobility services. In short, a service with the convenience of a private vehicle without the hassle of ownership. And making cities less vehicle-centric would definitely make them more liveable.
A successful MaaS service would also bring new business models and ways to operate various transport options. It would indeed benefit transport operators in giving access to improved data and new opportunities to serve unmet demand. The potential of MaaS is to maximise the use of the existing transit system and connect it with every alternative mobility offered in the city, which could basically solve urban density problems and make getting around easier, more efficient and environmental-friendly.
This is more than promising, but we’re not there yet, even in Helsinki. So what are the next steps towards the future of mobility?
First, we need to keep on developping multimodality, with cleaner vehicles, autonomous cars and obviously support active transportation as well. And we need to bear in mind that mobility has to be inclusive, so that it is accessible to anybody, regardless of their ability to move easily. MaaS is a great opportunity to cater to those needs and should benefit everyone.
In order to work, MaaS also requires a combination of public and private mobility offers. We’re past believing one does it better than the other, especially if we want to enjoy the innovation technology has to offer. Indeed, an important factor in making MaaS a success will be getting all of the players to work together. It’s already started, in Helsinki, but also in Paris for instance, where the local transit authority decided to subsidise private car-sharing during strikes and pollution peaks, or in Nice where Uber becomes a demand-responsive transport, with a fixed fare at night in areas with a poor public transit service. This is the beginning and we need to find a good balance between private and public actors : too much regulation and the private sector may find it difficult to innovate or participate; too little regulation and the public interest is not served.
To guarantee that public interest is the priority, transit authorities should coordinate with all actors. But they need to get ready soon, because new mobilities are moving fast (pun intended). For instance, Citymapper announced recently that they now integrate free floating bikes and scooters. In other words, they’re only a few steps away from being able to sell all the tickets you need for your journey, and be the key player in the MaaS system.
In order to be the pivot around which the mobility ecosystem revolves, a public transport authority first needs to offer qualitative open data. This is not an easy task, but offering reliable and reusable data is essential to provide the same free data for everyone to use and develop new services. That would allow the public sector to be free from proprietary data (i.e., recent Google maps API pricing change) and create an open architecture that private partners can integrate to, but that still meets the needs of their citizens.
Without getting into the details, because data is not the main topic of this article, the data provider is roughly one of the intermediary layers between the transportation operator and the end user. It manages the data exchange between the multiple service providers, giving the application programming interface (API) gateways and analytics on usage, demand, planning, and reporting. Because individual service providers are not likely to share their app data, having a third party involved can remove some of the barriers to cooperation that would otherwise arise. And that third party should be the local public transport authority.
Helsinki may have launched the concept, but it’s not the only city where things have started to change. One of the most advanced transit authorities in that regard is Transport for London. It does not have its own app; instead, it provides its API to more than 8,000 developers and its data is currently being used in more than 500 apps. Île-de-France Mobilités, the transport authority in the Paris region that I happen to work for, is catching up and opened its Open data platform in 2015, providing a real-time API since 2017. This platform paves the way to a full MaaS platform that would be the sandbox for everyone to play and develop services. Here’s to building sand castles!
Sources:
- “Everybody for car-sharing” in Paris (french)
- “In Nice, Uber becomes a public demand-responsive transport” (french)
- Citymapper — The age of floating transport
- Ile-de-France Mobilités Open data paltform (french)
