The commercial viability of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS): what’s in it for existing transport operators, and why should governments intervene?

ABSTRACT

Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) offers consumers access to multiple transport modes and services, owned and/or operated by different mobility service providers, through an integrated digital platform for planning, booking and payment. The platform provider needs to negotiate independent deals with different transport operators. Consequently, the success of any MaaS platform will depend on the platform provider’s ability to persuade as many operators as possible to join their platform. This study examines the commercial value proposition of MaaS from the perspective of existing transport operators. We find that MaaS could help strengthen complementary relationships between services, offer operators access to newer customers and larger markets, and help them manage their assets more efficiently. However, integration with substitutive services could undermine operators’ profitability. Moreover, similar benefits could be realised through other information and communication technologies without requiring integration with other services. Consequently, if left to the market, integration between operators is likely to be piecemeal and ad-hoc, and may strengthen monopolistic power of some operators. This, alongside the opportunities that MaaS presents to help achieve broader societal goals, calls for an active role for governments in the development, operation and regulation of MaaS to deliver on the vision of a fully integrated transport system.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility-as-a-Service
• commercial viability
• profitability
• transport economics
• political economy
• transport governance

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by iMOVE CRC and supported by the Cooperative Research Centres programme, an Australian Government initiative; and Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW). The authors thank Virginie Vernin for providing essential feedback on different aspects of this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 https://whimapp.com/plans/; please note that since then Whim has changed their offerings.

2 https://www.intelligenttransport.com/transport-news/91851/germanys-first-mobility-flat-rate-starts-in-augsburg/

3 https://www.uberhealth.com/au/en/

4 Services which are not generally available to the public, or which are incidental to another kind of business, such as a nursing home using a vehicle it owns to take residents to a doctor’s appointment; or a club or hotel using its vehicles to provide a courtesy service to its members / guests.

5 IT-enabled shared public transportation services that serve passengers using dynamically generated routes and schedules, and may expect passengers to make their way to and from common pick-up or drop-off points. Vehicles can range from large SUVs to vans to shuttle buses. They are contracted by the public sector. These services have also been referred to in the literature as demand responsive transport (DRT) and flexible transport services (FTS).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by IMove CRC [grant number IMove 3-005].