Mobility as a Service (MaaS): past and present challenges and future opportunities

Abstract

Recently, Mobility as a Service (MaaS) concept and its main theoretical approaches have been under discussion, to positively influence the future of mobility. Namely, by contextualizing MaaS’s role in modern societies explaining its main functions, characteristics, and attributes, as well as identifying all the stakeholders involved in this comprehensive challenge towards ensuring its widespread implementation. The environmental, societal, technological and cultural changes needed to ensure a sustainable mobility ecosystem are an utmost challenge that requires an intense effort and involvement of all different types of stakeholders within their perspectives, roles, responsibilities and contributions to the mobility system overall behavior and performance. Notwithstanding, the global tendency of digital transformation, also referred as digitization, in society and businesses are upbringing a new technological evolution that will lead to a new mobility paradigm bringing together MaaS and the internet of Mobility (IoM), thus creating what we call the Internet of Mobility as a Service (IoMaaS). The future trends of mobility will have to be ‘human-centric’, to properly balance the amount of technology requested into the ecosystem to ensure the whole system’s universality, to be inclusive, as well as developing the appropriate amount of technology, accordingly to the different users’ technological skills. Furthermore, different types of incentives and penalties need to be included in supporting a broad cultural shift regarding citizen’s mobility routines habits. This will be of great importance to ensure the sustainability of this new mobility paradigm as well as of the ability to attain all its benefits.