You are losing track of different new mobility services and offers like freefloating or station-based carsharing, on-demand services, ride sharing, e-bike- or scooter sharing and combined offers besides public transport options? Just download an app, register, choose your mobility preferences, indicate your route and off you go with one single account. In brief that is the idea of “MaaS”.
The concept of “MaaS – Mobility as a Service” is based on a digital platform, that enables to combine and utilize the services of the different public and private transport providers via one single account. Sounds simple? Ideally it keeps what it promises. Yet behind the user interface it requires the management of a huge complexity:
Who is delivering the transport services? Do the interests of transport operators match with the interests of city policies concerning mobility and urban development? Are there any operators at all available, especially in the urban periphery? What are the business models for the MaaS providers and the single transport operators? Do the provided services match user’s demands? And will the concept of MaaS lead to more convenient and environmentally friendly mobility at the end?
The European research project “OptiMaaS – Optimized Mobility as a Service: Holistic mobility solutions for the urban periphery” addresses these questions amongst others. The project aims at reducing congestion through better multimodal, environmentally friendly mobility services in the urban periphery and improving the social acceptance of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) offers. The project members develop new methods and processes addressing the needs of public and private mobility actors to provide optimized MaaS offers in the urban periphery.
Therefor Mobility-Labs (physical and virtual) in Vienna and Oslo will be set up, to evaluate the impacts of different strategies on city planning policies, new business models, cooperations of public and on private mobility actors as well as the user acceptance of individualized MaaS offers.
For this cooperation, public and private transport operators, urban planners, IT platform providers and research institutions from Austria, Belgium and Norway have joint their efforts: tbw research GesmbH (project coordinator), Institute of Transport Economics TØI, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, UIV Urban Innovation Vienna, MO.Point Mobilitätsservices GmbH, Upstream – next level mobility GmbH, Wiener Linien, Brussels Mobility and Ruter AS. The project is funded by the European Joint Program Initiative (JPI) „Urban Europe under the call „Making Cities Work“.
Further informations: www.optimaas.eu