What are the Benefits of Mobility as a Solution for Commuters?

What Exactly is “MaaS”?

MaaS should be characterised as a better, faster, more interconnected and holistic personal transportation process that can benefit cities, communities and transit agencies.

Despite many outside of the transport sector never having heard of the term, the concept is being discussed in government chambers, City Halls and planning authorities. The challenge is that they all define MaaS differently.

However, two crucial elements are often left out of the definitions. These are the role of the wider public transit sector and the role of local and central government bodies in delivering MaaS to their communities. This is why Cubic defines MaaS as a combination of public and private transportation services within a given regional environment that provides optimal, holistic and people-centred travel options.

What are the benefits of MaaS for commuters?

With the introduction of Uber and Lyft along with increased public transport options such as Crossrail, consumers have more options to help them from A to B. Yet the need for multiple travel passes or apps makes the situation complex.

This is where MaaS helps. It can enable end-to-end journeys paid for by the user as a single charge whilst simplifying how you manage that journey by having one user account. For transit operators, having one account tied to an individual passenger means a complete picture of their journey is available as-it-happens.

Public and private providers within a region are united under the same customer administration and payment infrastructure, while retaining control over fares and slashing payment processing costs.

By removing friction and offering choice in facilitating end-to-end journeys, MaaS encourages travellers to pursue other methods of transport than the private car, presenting a cost-conscious transportation alternative.

What technology is needed to enable MaaS?

MaaS will be underpinned by IoT, mobile and big data. Together, these three technologies are already transforming the way retail services and mass media are used today. Consumers already benefit from improved technology, especially real-time information and personalised capabilities at their fingertips. Also there is no reason why the transportation sector can’t also reap the rewards from improved technology.

With the increased connectivity in our transport networks thanks to smartphone usage and the rising adoption of IoT, vast amounts of data are being generated, if this data can be harnessed and analysed then it can be applied to improve operations. Just last year humanity generated more data than in the previous 5,000 years of existence.

As the speed of innovation continues, there could be too much data for humans unassisted to process in the required time frame. As the volume of data increases so too will advances in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning which can crunch the data much faster and draw more intelligent insights from the raw numbers.

Additionally, connectivity enables transit agencies to invest in vehicle-to infrastructure (V2I) technology that helps vehicles and their drivers make better sense of their surroundings, analyse traffic and weather information, thus helping make subsequent adjustments to the service increasing its efficiency.

Can MaaS play a role in smart cities?

Absolutely, because MaaS improves transport efficiency. A smart city will be judged on how efficient its public services are, namely transport. MaaS is therefore the natural transport process for a smart city.

There are also wider benefits for smart cities. For example, MaaS could reduce congestion in cities by reducing the reliance on private vehicles as our main means of transportation, also increasing road space. By encouraging people to travel by shared means of transportation or to enter car-pooling schemes, MaaS limits the number of private car trips and miles driven.

For city authorities, this makes predicting traffic flows and reacting to traffic events much easier. This then results in increased efficiency. Having less vehicles on the road will   positively impact the environment and promote a more sustainable form of transportation. While also increasing the standard of living within our cities.

Additionally, the integration and aggregation of all transportation-related information from a variety of sources will give cities unprecedented insight into travel patterns. With the help of AI and machine learning they would be able to analyse and draw conclusions about how travel decisions are made and what influences them.

Having this full insight into travel data would also help re-route demand to assist those portions of the transportation network that are struggling the most. Cities could advise when a specific route is unavailable and offer useful alternatives that would get us to our destinations on time whilst ensuring it is the optimum choice for the entire network. The quality of route-finding services would greatly improve and enhance the flow of traffic through major corridors

Author

Andy Taylor, Strategy Director at Cubic Transportation Systems   

Andy Taylor is a familiar figure in the MaaS community. With over 25 years of experience in the transportation sector, Taylor has worked all over the world on transportation projects such as work for the UK Department of Transport and Cubic Transportation Systems. It is in his current role that Andy has worked constantly on developing MaaS analysis models to help encourage cities to invest more in MaaS systems.

Andy is featured in our Top Mobility as a Service influencers list, you can see him here.