End-to-End Approach for Mobility-as-a-Service tools, business models, enabling framework and evidence for European seamless mobility
The main goal of MaaS4EU is to provide quantifiable evidence, frameworks and tools to enable the MaaS concept, by addressing challenges under four pillars:
Travelling is a complicated part of our daily lives, as we have to use different tools to find information for planning and conducting trips.
Citizens will not give up private automobiles as their preferred mode of transportation unless they are offered a service that provides equal sense of convenience, reliability and flexibility. The MaaS concept removes many of these user-related pain points and envisages a service that offers travellers seamless mobility, easy access to different transport modes based on their needs, relief from the unforeseen costs and unavailability associated with owning a car while still having access to one, and control over travel time and costs. In order for this to be achieved a new player needs to enter the transport market, namely the MaaS operator. As seen in our vision for the MaaS4EU project, the MaaS operator acts as an intermediary between transport operators and users, by booking (or buying) capacity from the former and selling it to the latter. The customers can configure and buy a bundle of services (composed of different modes) and can make informed decisions about which one (or combination) to use for each of their trips by using the single interface. In addition, the MaaS operator can propose the ideal combination of transport modes to them for each trip by knowing the network conditions in real time (supply side) and the preferences of users (demand side). In other words, the MaaS operator can optimize the supply and the demand.