Survey Results: A Discussion on Bringing MaaS to the Masses

Survey Results: A Discussion on Bringing MaaS to the Masses

As people journey to work post-COVID, road congestion is easing its way back into people's everyday lives, hindering travel with slower speeds and longer trip times. The vision of progress within public, private, and shared transportation modes lie in Mobility on Demand (MOD) and Mobility as a Service (MaaS) solutions. As Cubic Transportation Systems works towards implementing practical Maas projects, we wanted to hear the significant concerns and considerations from our public and private stakeholders. That is why we created the "2021 Maas Survey" study, which ran from 2 until 30 April.

While responses varied across different stakeholders, the split between public agencies and private enterprises is equitable, providing a fair and balanced representation of market and stakeholder priorities. Results spanned from 135 respondents, including:

• Global transportation industry stakeholders
• Association and alliance members
• Agency executives
• Mobility technology providers

The exact origin of respondents is shown in the chart:

Over half of the respondents classify themselves as global or international players, meaning that a global perspective is needed when considering MaaS deployments. In this, we should simplify interoperability to integrate different stakeholders and promote roaming for end users.

The key development locations are Europe, led by the MaaS Alliance, and North America, led by the Mobility on Demand Alliance. This is not to say that MaaS is insignificant regarding other regions within the global focus. For instance, Australia demonstrated the most significant relative response rate among the global regions.

In ranking pressing transit issues for their cities or regions, results show that stakeholders are most concerned with growing road network congestion, highlighting a demonstrated post-COVID surge in congestion. Other highly ranked concerns include falling public transport ridership and efficient first/last mile options.

When we examine the key priorities facing cities and regions now, utilizing the public transport network is imperative. As cities and municipalities begin reopening after the pandemic, agencies anticipate whether or not public transport usage will return to pre-pandemic levels. The truth is, for any intelligent MaaS or MOD solution to be most effective, they must be built with public transport as the backbone.

Interestingly, all stakeholders see data sharing and data privacy as the central issue in the development of MaaS. Making data accessible while keeping information private is imperative. However, we must also consider that we must ensure that General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is compliant from the global perspective. Amongst public agencies, the cost of deployment and operations was a close second.

Survey results concluded that when deploying Maas or MOD, any trial should provide all mobility services. From a public agency perspective, it becomes clear that agencies prefer to integrate and offer mobility services in the following order:

• Demand Responsive Transport Services (DRT) - for instance, Sydney/Transport for New South Wales in Australia works with Via for DRT and just integrated the opal card for payment
• Bike/scooter share
• Car-share
• Transportation Network Company (TNC) services

Unsurprisingly, over 55% of respondents said that some form of a public agency should be responsible for regulating and coordinating MaaS or MOD services. Regarding who should be accountable for delivering MaaS or MOD in a city or region, respondents show an even split of preference between MaaS Operators, Public Transport Operators, and an open market with multiple stakeholders. Given the limited deployments to date, we expect this to vary over time.

The majority of users expect MaaS to become mainstream in 5-to-10 years. Fortunately for all of the stakeholders in the MaaS/MOD ecosystem, only 16% of those surveyed, think that MaaS and MOD will never become mainstream.

Author: Andy Taylor, Senior Strategy Director, Cubic Transportation Systems