Mobility as a service : defining a transport utopia

Having been widely acknowledged as enabling access to education, employment, leisure and social activities, transport choices are also the cause of many challenges cities face. Recognising that change is needed, planners and policymakers are considering alternative methods of planning and delivering transport. Mobility as a Service (or MaaS) is one such idea that has gained traction with academics and professionals alike. Hailed as the answer to integrating complex transport systems, MaaS has yet to be implemented at scale in urban transport systems due in part to the lack of an agreed conceptual definition, the top-down approach to implementing what is meant to be a more personalised method of accessing transport, and the lack of local promoters (in comparison to global corporations and lobbyists). This article reflects on the current barriers to defining MaaS, considers how a novel public engagement approach could be used to create local definitions that support citizen engagement, and suggests a route forward for future research

A Service-Oriented Approach to Crowdsensing for Accessible Smart Mobility Scenarios

This work presents an architecture to help designing and deploying smart mobility applications. The proposed solution builds on the experience already matured by the authors in different fields: crowdsourcing and sensing done by users to gather data related to urban barriers and facilities, computation of personalized paths for users with special needs, and integration of open data provided by bus companies to identify the actual accessibility features and estimate the real arrival time of vehicles at stops. In terms of functionality, the first “monolithic” prototype fulfilled the goal of composing the aforementioned pieces of information to support citizens with reduced mobility (users with disabilities and/or elderly people) in their urban movements. In this paper, we describe a service-oriented architecture that exploits the microservices orchestration paradigm to enable the creation of new services and to make the management of the various data sources easier and more effective. The proposed platform exposes standardized interfaces to access data, implements common services to manage metadata associated with them, such as trustworthiness and provenance, and provides an orchestration language to create complex services, naturally mapping their internal workflow to code. The manuscript demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach by means of some case studies

Challenges and Potentials for Development of Mobility as a Service : Finnish Public Sector Actor Perspective

Cities are facing pressure to overcome critical challenges that force us to rethink our unsustainable mobility patterns. Therefore, the transportation sector is going through major changes. Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is one of the innovations trying to change how we travel, a concept that originates from Finland. MaaS is a concept that brings all the transport providers and modes into one platform. A distinctive feature of MaaS is the possibility to buy tickets for the entire journey, removing the need to go through multiple websites and ticket schemes. However, MaaS is still an emerging concept and therefore it lacks official definition. Finland has been in the forefront of this transportation reform with new legislation that supports the creation of MaaS. The public sector has traditionally had a central role in the provision of transport services where regulation and subsidies are needed. However, the new legislation strongly advocates market-based services, and thus the public sector needs to reconsider their position. Therefore, it is important to understand how the Finnish public sector and the parties actually executing the law sees MaaS, its impacts and their role in MaaS. The thesis is qualitative in nature and 20 public sector representatives were interviewed from 17 different organizations. The organizations consist of governmental organizations, interest groups, regional organizations and cities that vary in size. The interview analysis has been guided by concept of emerging technology. Emerging technology is characterized of being technology that can change multiply sectors at the same time but simultaneously has not yet demonstrated its value. The results showed that there is big variety how public sector representatives define MaaS. Additionally, the respondents felt there is a lot of challenges related to MaaS, such as working business model, lack of services, technical challenges, area of demand among others. Positive side was if MaaS would make transport more efficient and provide savings for the public sector. User wise it was clear that MaaS needs to be effortless for the user in order to compete with private cars. Overall the respondents saw more opportunities for MaaS than possible negative effects, but the lack of widespread MaaS scheme makes it hard to evaluate any effects. However, MaaS raised also suspicions among some respondents. As for the legislation, it did not gather any positive feedback outside of government officials, especially the openness of the drafting process received criticism. The results also showed that there is contradicting view on the roles among the different groups of representatives. In conclusion it should be taken into consideration how future policies are formed as now the experienced exclusion of drafting the legislation might have hindered the cooperation and created suspicion towards the whole concept. Additionally, it is clear there is insecurities inside the public sector caused by uncertainties related to MaaS. Implementation has been slow since public sector feels the government has told them to do something, they do not have ability to do. Nevertheless, generally the public sector is still welcoming MaaS. Especially cities hoped that MaaS would enable them to cut their service in low dense areas. However, there is still no will to financially support MaaS, it seen that it is a job for private sector to take the risks

Public transportation, ioT, trust and urban habits

The technological compound known as Internet of Things is enabling massive transformations in many fields. In this paper, we deal with one emerging scenario, Mobility as a Service, where the interplay between technical, regulatory and social aspects is intense. We advocate the need for interdisciplinary research, taking into account the different facets of a system which, in summary, aims at improving the quality of urban life by collecting personal data, tracking citizens’ movements, correlating them with many other sources of information, and making the results widely available