Mobility as a Service: Concept and Practice

In recent years, the planning and delivery of community transportation have seen their own “industrial revolution,” except at a much quicker pace than was ever seen in the 18th/19th century version. The field has experienced the advent of sophisticated algorithms for scheduling routes and trips, GIS-based tracking and monitoring of vehicles, apps that allow customers to more directly interface with services and receive minute- by-minute service updates, and now even automated operations of vehicles. Simultaneously, and largely enabled by these technological advances, the range of modes for moving about the community has rapidly evolved. To the traditional choices of travel by private automobile, bus, taxi, and train, we have now added bikeshare, carshare, on-demand carpooling and shuttling, vanpooling, and transportation network companies.

Most of these advances have been added to the community transportation menu piecemeal, leaving transportation planners and operators to figure out how to integrate them into existing options. The focus of this brief is on one promising strategy for giving customers a single interface through which they can access any and all transportation services in their community: Mobility as a Service (MaaS).