Ursula O’Sullivan-Dale asks a group of experts what role Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) could have in the future of transport services in the UK…
The concept behind any Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform is to essentially create a super-app that enables users to book any type of ticket, on any transport mode, for any kind of trip, without the need to jump between websites and mobile apps. At its core, MaaS aims to provide users with the power to make informed decisions about how they can travel for each individual journey. In addition to consolidating a range of transport services in one place, MaaS can also enable users to plan trips around real-time data, see the difference in cost and even review the environmental impact of their decisions.
Despite the idealistic vision behind MaaS, the complexity of bringing all of these factors together, while also ensuring the concept is commercially sustainable, means that MaaS has yet to truly take off in the UK. Only now are a handful of local authorities and transport operators beginning to seriously evaluate the viability of the technology as tool for leading greater numbers of people towards public transport and active travel.
With the likes of Leicester City Council, Transport for Greater Manchester and Solent Transport all publicly embarking on their own MaaS initiatives, could the concept finally be about to reach a tipping point? Here, Harvey Blundell, transport development officer at Leicester City Council, John Nuuniten, CEO at SkedGO, Dr Marcus Enoch, professor in transport strategy at Loughborough University, and Ashley Feldman, transport and smart cities, programme and policy manager at TechUK, discuss the challenges, benefits and opportunities of deploying MaaS platforms across the country.
How does MaaS fit in with the current transport strategy of the UK’s local authorities?
Professor Marcus Enoch: There are some local authorities, such as West Midlands Combined Authority, which have secured funding based on the fact they’re experimenting with MaaS. But there are a lot of other local authorities that are just waiting to see whether it works or not. The idea of a regional MaaS system where local authorities don’t even have capacity to run local transport doesn’t make any sense. I don’t see it as a mainstream change.
What have Leicester City Council (LCC) and SkedGo been doing to promote MaaS and active travel?
Harvey Blundell: What [the app] does is take together a modal mix of everything in the city and neatly packages it up and provides it to the public. It’s very much aiming to promote active travel. The idea is that by providing high quality technology solutions, as well as behaviour change and soft measures, along with infrastructure, we can hopefully encourage some kind of modal shift among the population.
John Nuuniten: Leicester City Council is using MaaS as this catalyst to change behaviour among commuters [by giving] them access to the tools to enable them to [switch]. What we’ve done with Leicester is we’ve incorporated the council’s philosophy of active travel into the journey planner itself; this is the key point. Something like Google is one-size-fits-all [but] SkedGo can localise the offering to include local transport services.
How can MaaS help meet sustainable development goals (SDGs)?
Ashley Feldman: MaaS has a role to play within SDGs, especially sustainable cities and the UN’s new Urban Agenda. MaaS can help transition away from single-occupancy vehicles and private car use. Vehicles aren’t designed for every user, so MaaS can help make vehicles more sustainable and accessible. Trying to democratise transport is fundamental to the achievement of SDGs. The shift to EVs will be a big part of that, but we need a much more multimodal approach.
Marcus Enoch: If MaaS can attract people to less polluting modes, then there should be environmental benefits. The other side is if you give people more choice and make journeys easier, you might end up encouraging them to travel more and to travel further than they otherwise would. In that case, you’re causing more emissions. On balance, it’s probably more beneficial, but it depends on how it’s set up.
John Nuuniten: Our app gives a CO2 reading and will tell you what each journey leg’s resulting emissions will be. That’s the first part of informing an audience; then you’ve got to give them the capability of changing their habits. To reinforce that, behaviour nudging plays a very important role in carbon and congestion reduction.
What role might measurement and incentives have in the success of MaaS?
Ashley Feldman: Measurement and reporting are very important. The UK Department for Transport (DfT) sees MaaS as part of a transport decarbonisation plan, so it needs to see a strong evidence base around what the net gains are that MaaS is generating. The use of incentives does create some challenges. Commercial partners each might want to direct passengers to their services, which means less carbon intensive methodssuch as walking and cycling may not be a priority. Companies must be willing to direct potential revenue away from the service offering, which is the central dichotomy of MaaS. Incentives most likely need to be financial. Many industries use carbon tagging and data around eco-friendly options, but there’s a lack of evidence that this leads to a shift to lower carbon.
Harvey Blundell: We work with an app that has incentives built in, so points mean prizes for walking and cycling. We are currently looking at mixing some of the behaviour-nudging stuff into the journey planner. I think there’s still more work that needs to be done generally to align those two technologies into one. Actual measuring is more difficult – on the backend it is hard to quantify and we’re not looking to collect buckets of data on people. With other commercial operators, such as Google Maps, data collection is their whole product, they know exactly where you’ve been, what you’ve eaten and that’s not what we’re trying to do. We will try to get people from A to B as simply and as easily as possible.
John Nuuniten: The market is about more than just having a journey planner and giving a variety of different modes. Having or displaying or quantifying cost, time, carbon and even calorie counting gets people thinking about different ways of doing things. People will experiment if they’ve got an app that delivers alternatives. If those alternatives are appealing to the user, they’ll try them. The biggest challenge for us is getting users back again and again – this is where the incentives come in, when you start to reward good behaviour and disincentivise bad behaviour. One I’ve seen that works pretty well is a loyalty programme, like the one Better Points uses. I think that’s the way to go.
What are some of the main barriers to implementation?
Dr Marcus Enoch: The regulatory regime and ownership regime are problematic. If I am a bus operator, why should I share my data with other bus operators who will steal my market share? The way transport is run in the UK is you try to serve your customers as best you can, but as soon as they’re off your vehicle, they’re not your problem anymore. The capacity of local authorities is a huge problem as well. MaaS is not a core part of what they do. Even for a lot of subsidised bus routes, local authorities just get rid of them because they’re not statutorily obliged to provide them, so why bother with MaaS?
Ashley Feldman: The first barrier is a lack of consistency in defining what MaaS is and what it means within a city. The utopian vision for MaaS is a uniform way of accessing travel. Technical integration is also very costly and challenging when trying to combine different data systems and flows. Technical issues can include algorithmic biases, so making sure algorithms are written in such a way that they don’t prioritise one demographic or mode. All of this needs standardisation, open data models, ways of sharing and interoperability. We need to create value for not just customers but all parties and, while pockets of this are happening, there is no dominant or winning framework.
Harvey Blundell: I would say a lot of the journey planners rely on public data sources, which has its challenges. I think we need more of them and more of higher quality. Also, I think the competition in the market can make it quite difficult to carve out a niche. It’s been hard to get colleagues and partners to commit any resources; we are quite stretched at the moment. We looked at integrating some pricing data but the issue with that was the complexity involved in getting the data from bus companies. We made the decision to instead wait for standardisation from DfT before jumping on board.
John Nuuniten: Data is the most critical component of journey planning; the better the data, the better the user experience. Our constant battle is to make sure we get the best data into the system to produce the best results. Over time people will trade off some privacy for advanced functionality. When something is valuable to you, you are prepared to give a little bit toward it. Besides that, I really don’t see any barriers, I mostly see opportunities. For example, in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, there has been legislative change that encourages multimodal transit. You need a significant change in philosophy like that. They can see the difference in their wallets and the benefits of multimodal travel. Matkahuolto MaaS service in Finland is always pointed to as a world example and its those types of regulatory changes that leapfrog the industry to the next level.
Getting over the Finnish line
Finnish company Matkahuolto was the world’s first to implement a nation-wide MaaS scheme. While supportive government legislation was helpful to the project, some technical difficulties were inevitable. Tuomo Kinnunen, technical manager at Matkahuolto, says “in Finland we have more than 20 different operators in many cities…and more than 100 APIs. The more APIs and systems [you have], the bigger the cost of integration from the technical side”. Leila Lehtinen, head of passenger and operator services at Matkahuolto, adds that there were also financial difficulties, as not all cities were willing to pay the company a commission to set up the service. A lack of standardisation means that trying to integrate the pricing data of multiple operators for multi-leg journeys into a single route is a source of ongoing difficulty.
The pair pointed to successful communication as one factor in the scheme’s success, as the company engaged with the officials that supervise how municipalities follow transport legislation from an early stage. Lehtinen said, “there needs to be the will to make [the service providers] operate together so that you don’t look at it only from your own city or from your own region. This is the only way you can make strategic targets to work”.
This article was originally published in the September 2022 issue of CiTTi Magazine. Read the original article.
