Workshop 5 Report. Governing emerging mobility services including rethinking Mobility as a Service (MaaS)

Abstract

Workshop 5 of Thredbo 18 builds on ideas and research suggestions from Workshops 5 and 6 of Thredbo 17 that looked at new service models governing emerging mobility services and micromobility movement in urban transport, respectively. The evidence from papers in this Workshop were grouped into two broad topic areas: the first considered including public transport in developing countries and its competition from other modes; the role of governance in different contexts and geographies; and shared transport for a single mode, and the second relating to developments in Mobility as a Service (MaaS), particularly involving multiservice providers, and its potential in rural and regional areas and for older and disabled persons. The discussions benefitted from embedding in the Strategic – Tactical – Operational (STO) framework. This identified a mismatch between issues that were in the tactical and operational categories and a further mismatch between tactical and strategic where the tactical level is critical in translating strategic objectives into operational activities. In this context it became clear from a number of papers that there was a lack of clarity in governance frameworks (tactical level) leading to an unsurprising lack of clarity in operational activities. Policy recommendations included the promotion of global learning, the growing role for government to work with industry and the expansion of the training portfolios. Future research needs to expand existing governance research, provide more evidence-based evaluations and recognise the larger number of stakeholders involved in providing mobility and accessibility to benefit users.