Assessment of the barriers in establishing passenger mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) systems: An analogy with multimodal freight transport

Although the number of Mobility as a service (MaaS) field deployments and studies have increased rapidly in recent years, sustained commercial success remains elusive for many MaaS systems. In this paper, we investigate potential barriers constraining MaaS from wider sustainable success, developing the analogy between passenger-focused MaaS and multimodal freight transport, with the latter having appeared earlier and being subject to more extensive research. We find that the public policy and regulation barriers faced by the two services are broadly similar, whereas operational and infrastructural barriers are very different. Barriers stressed heavily in the multimodal freight transport literature, which may also be important issues preventing greater commercial success of passenger MaaS, include: 1) inadequately understood link between cost efficiency and scale (critical volume, transport distance), 2) the need for seamless intermodal transfer infrastructure, 3) ambiguous stakeholder power structures, 4) importance of guaranteed passenger arrival time service, and 5) immature business models. Due to the inherent differences between MaaS and multimodal freight transport, additional barriers specific to MaaS, such as passengers’ diverse travel demands, physical needs, and concerns around user privacy in information sharing, also warrant further investigation. We hope this paper provides MaaS researchers and practitioners with a novel perspective on the challenges in MaaS development, leveraging insights from multimodal freight transport to anticipate and effectively address future obstacles.