Global Trends of New Mobility: Mobility as a Service

New Investments Ahead 

The new area is growing rapidly and the market is getting bigger and bigger, especially in Europe, which has been the early pioneer of MaaS. There have been several forecasts and studies regarding the increase of the Mobility as a Service market in the future, varying from USD 106.8 billion  to an over USD 1 trillion  global market by 2030. However, one thing is clear from the forecasts and studies: the market is booming. For instance, a couple of years back it was noted that over 1,700 start-ups were disrupting the automotive industry and it goes without saying that  new innovations are in need of capital. 

Big players in the automotive and technology industries are involved in exploring the new market, either via investments (e.g. Denso, Veho, Toyota and Karsan have invested in Finnish company MaaS Global who is providing an app called Whim ) and/or doing development of their own (e.g. Tesla's autonomous mobility service).

Forerunners of MaaS

As described in our earlier article in December 2019, the Nordic countries have proven to be well equipped to take on a leading role and shift their transport system due to the legislative environment in these countries around key trends of mobility. For instance, the Finnish Act on Transport Services (Laki liikenteen palveluista in Finnish, also known as Liikennepalvelulaki ) came into force in 2018 and aims to promote the implementation of MaaS, amongst other things. The Nordic countries are not the only well positioned countries in the new mobility industry. France is also at the forefront of the development of new mobility schemes and MaaS models. On November 19th, 2019 the French Parliament adopted the so-called “Mobility Orientation Act”, covering all aspects of terrestrial transportation: individual and shared cars, carpooling, buses, railways, and chauffeur driven vehicles, along with “soft” urban mobility such as rental bikes or electric scooters. 

To this end, the French legislator wishes to foster the digitalisation of the transportation sector and encourage public and private initiatives to design and implement local MaaS platforms. A specific regulatory framework has thus been created to enable local government to fund and/or set up platforms (multimodal digital services) within their territory, whose purpose would be to provide the public with all available information on the transportation offering within the area, to calculate the best itineraries based on available static and dynamic data regarding traffic, schedules and infrastructure conditions, and to propose combined (multimodal) travel. 

The extent of the MaaS Platform responsibilities may extend as far as issuing tickets, billing and collecting payments on behalf of the mobility operators (carpooling services, rental bike operators, parking lot managers etc.), or even selling services directly through distribution arrangements.