The importance of user perspective in the evolution of MaaS

The rapid emergence of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) into the transport sector’s lexicon has brought with it an air of expectation that suggests a future mobility revolution. This paper focusses on the user perspective and offers a deepening of socio-technical thinking about MaaS and its prospects. It first provides an examination of what is understood to date about MaaS in what is a new but rapidly evolving body of literature. This highlights the concept of MaaS as a ‘mobility system beyond the private car’ and the new centrality of a ‘mobility intermediary’ layer in that system. The paper then focuses and elaborates upon its contention that MaaS is neither new nor revolutionary but is rather an evolutionary continuation in terms of transport integration. Emerging from an era of unimodal travel information systems becoming multimodal and then integrated multimodal information services, MaaS is now about adding seamless booking, payment and ticketing to the integration offer. The paper puts forward a ‘Levels of MaaS Integration (LMI) taxonomy’ analogous to the level 0-5 SAE taxonomy for automation of road vehicles. This taxonomy, designed around the user perspective (including cognitive user effort), concerns operational, information and transactional integration that it is suggested reflect a hierarchy of user need. From a synthesis of insights from the ‘pre-MaaS’ literature concerning choice making for travel and the role of information, a MaaS behavioural schema is provided to illustrate potential consideration and adoption of MaaS from the user perspective. In concluding, the paper considers what a user perspective reveals for the future prospects of MaaS and in particular for the mobility intermediaries