We’re very excited to announce the launch of our Mobility Impact Series!
The words “sustainability” and “mobility” are often mentioned in the same breath. As an industry, mobility is defined by innovations that claim to be based on the common goal of creating a more sustainable and healthier future for our cities and our planet.
But these “green” future visions often leave watchers of the mobility space scratching their heads: what does the term sustainable mobility really mean, anyway?
At Trafi, we’ve been helping cities build and enhance their mobility systems for over 10 years. We’re often approached about the sustainable impact of shared mobility, which is why we’ve decided to delve deeper into the topic with our new Mobility Impact Series.
In upcoming articles, we’ll be discussing “car-topias”, pedestrian-friendly cities, travel patterns and a variety of other subjects. Stay tuned to our LinkedIn channel and check our blog regularly for updates.
Without further ado, read on to learn more the roots of car-centric societies – and why the mobility landscape today is in need of an update.
If anyone still has doubts about cars being a hurdle on the road to sustainable mobility, there are numerous shocking statistics in circulation that could change their mind, as seen below.
There are plenty more:
These numbers aren’t new – scientists, activists and some industry players mention them frequently. However, sustainable mobility is rarely considered in its historical context. Seven decades ago, car manufacturers were selling the cutting-edge dream of a convenient, liberating and comfortable life, finally available to the middle classes for the reasonable price of one automobile; today, digital mobility innovators are disrupting old mobility habits with promises of greener, safer, friendlier cities.
In essence, the core of their sales strategies are very similar: new, exciting mobility solutions have the power to transform our lives for the better. A myriad of solutions on the market today are aimed at improving bits and pieces of the system, but rarely tackle the root of the issue itself. Which of these promises are truly constructive waypoints on the road to liveable cities, and which are just bells and whistles distracting from bigger issues at hand?
Back when the VW Lemon (recognizable as the VW Beetle today) hit the American market in 1960, the advertising campaign surrounding its launch caused an incredible stir. “Think small”, the campaign’s slogan, was revolutionary, changing advertising forever and helping the tiny and somewhat odd-looking VW Lemon cruise its way into the luxury car market in the US – and permanently changing the way people perceived cars in the process.
Up until that point, cars were shiny, large, and loud; the compact, rounder Lemon offered a stark contrast to American muscle cars and appealed to an entirely new segment of car owners. It made simpler cars fashionable, democratizing cars and making them accessible to everyone.
Of course, advertising agencies aren’t the only ones responsible for societies and cities designed around cars. The entire urban planning system in the US encouraged car ownership and viewed automobiles as a convenient, modern transport solution. In the meantime, however, the American transit system was being rebuilt with the goal of linking suburbs to city centers, rather than linking suburbs with other suburbs or more rural areas.
Add cheap gasoline, large investments in highways and a whole range of car-friendly consumer services like drive-in cinemas and drive-through restaurants to the mix, and you end up with an obvious conclusion: cars were practically destined to become the ultimate symbols of a comfortable, modern, convenience-driven lifestyle. The rest, as they say, was history.
Between the end of WWII and 1955, the number of cars on US roads doubled from 25 million to over 50 million. The trend quickly shifted to Europe, where new industry needs and changing economy led to skyrocketing mass production of individual vehicles. During the decade of 1950 to 1960, European car manufacturers launched some of their now-legendary models – Citroen’s 2CV stayed in production until 1990! – and the streets of the continent were quickly filled with motorized status symbols.
Transport demand is expected to grow all across the world in the coming decades as the global population increases, incomes rise, and more people can afford cars.The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that global transport (measured in passenger kilometers) will double and car ownership rates will increase by 60%.
Even as everyone from impassioned teenagers to conservative politicians are demanding more sustainable solutions, further construction on the “car-topia” we’re living in continues unchecked. Hollow value propositions promote electrification and autonomous technology as the path to a better, sustainable future, without telling consumers and investors what that means in explicit terms.
At Trafi, we believe in cities without privately owned cars. We have a different approach to mobility, and we think that genuinely effective and accessible mobility should be viewed as a service and a system that gets its strength from a diverse group of collaborators, leaders and city planners. The good news is that there are plenty of cities who have also pledged to work towards more cohesive and comprehensive mobility services for their citizens, and many have already implemented groundbreaking strategies – Berlin, Zurich, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Paris come to mind, but the market for Mobility-as-a-Service is growing in Latin America and Asia as well.
This vitally important shift to sustainable mobility – one based on concrete data rather than shiny new technology – simply can’t be achieved without the help of multiple mobility actors and particularly without the collaboration of the private and public mobility sectors. Governments, corporations, innovators and architects, and to a lesser degree consumers all have an important role to play. If we unite under the banner of protecting our planet, our cities and the people living in them, sustainable travel habits and a new way of thinking about mobility will become the norm.
Learn about how the Trafi MaaS Suite is enabling global sustainable solutions here or contact us for more info.
At Trafi we are excited to be the first MaaS provider to introduce personal bike routing, available in all our global rollouts, and as a stand-alone bike routing engine.
Bicycles have quickly won a more significant role in our daily commute in the past years. Between 30 and 40% kilometers a person rides on a bike are on home-work trips. Cycling brings significant benefits, not only personal ones to the cyclists like moving faster through the city and being healthier because of the active moving, but also environmental ones. According to the EU Cyclist Federation, cycling saves emissions equaling more than 16 million tons of CO2 equivalents per year in the EU. This corresponds to the total yearly CO2 emissions of a whole country like Croatia.
Moreover, cycling is getting more attention and encouragement from the government; for example, Utrecht in the Netherlands opened the world’s largest underground bicycle parking lot to support commuting by bikes. The COVID-19 pandemic has incentivized many cities worldwide to invest in infrastructure for biking & scooter options to support people’s shifting needs. In 2020 alone, almost 900km of new bicycle lanes have been created across the EU.
Planning a journey with a bike. In Trafi rollouts bike routing information is found on the “nearby” screen or the “route search” window. When a specific public transit stop is selected, a new icon in the “nearby” screen denotes which PT vehicles allow private bikes. In the route search results window, there is a new section dedicated to bike routing options. An intermodal routing option (a route showcasing the connected bicycle and public transit route) is displayed regularly within search results.
Bike routing algorithm. To provide the most-up-to-date bike routes and as accurate arrival time to the destination as possible, we use a combination of complex proprietary routing algorithms, real-time traffic information, OpenStreetMap, and NASA elevation data that is updated regularly. To calculate the routes, Trafi’s bike routing algorithm takes a number of criteria into account – available bike lanes, regular roads, side streets, incline, and elevation along the path, to name a few. Soon riders will be able to choose which route they prefer: the shortest (probably a bit steeper), flattest, or bicycle lane exclusive options. Road data changes fast, and we are working hard to provide the newest and most accurate information.
More and more people opt for biking, which is good news for cities, the environment, and personal riders’ health. We are here to support and incentivize their trips with a best-in-class experience.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
Starting today, we’re introducing universal micromobility scanners in all of our global rollouts. The first of its kind, the universal scanner function unlocks every micromobility vehicle connected to the Trafi platform. It’s accessible right from the homescreen and lets users access any vehicle they choose, irrespective of provider.
Additionally, we’ve launched the two-tap trip experience and improved vehicle discoverability on the map.
In this day and age, users expect nothing less than perfectly convenient digital experiences, and at Trafi, we pride ourselves on our ability to meet these rapidly evolving demands. The global apps powered by our technology have an average rating of 4.5 stars, similar only to Uber and other leading mobility apps.
The introduction of the universal scanner is the result of our determination to match the full experience of native micromobility apps and to continue our mission of pushing the mobility-tech envelope.
The universal scanner unlocks any integrated vehicle that supports QR codes.
It works like this: users open their Trafi-powered MaaS app – yumuv or Jelbi, for example – when standing in front of a vehicle they’d like to ride. (It doesn’t matter what sharing company the vehicle belongs to.) The user opens the homescreen of the app and then taps the “scanner” button. The scanner appears on the screen and the user points their smartphone at the QR code located on the top of the vehicle. The QR code is then automatically scanned and unlocked, and the user can hop on the vehicle and get moving.
It sounds as easy as it is. After scanning their vehicle of choice, users only have to tap their screens twice more: once to start their ride, and once to end their journey. We call that the “two-tap trip” experience.
This deceptively simple update is helpful to riders for obvious reasons. Not only does it match the riding experience provided by native apps, but it also opens access to multiple providers’ services.
It has an added bonus for micromobility service providers as well. Trafi’s universal scanner lets them expand and deploy new additions to their fleets quickly and easily – no need for complicated unlocking mechanisms.
One of the benefits of MaaS networks is the wide variety of mobility options they make available to users. More options let users weigh the benefits and compare the mobility modes available to them before deciding which one suits them best.
We take the desire to compare options into account at Trafi. Upon opening the homescreen map, all micromobility options in the user’s vicinity are clearly shown. (That also includes new icons that indicate the battery levels of each vehicle.)
When the user taps the “nearby” screen, they’re shown vehicles that have enough battery power to cover the average trip. (That’s roughly 3 kilometers for scooters, and up to 6 kilometers for e-bikes.) An ideal walking path and distance needed to reach that vehicle are immediately pre-selected and presented to the user as well. All guesswork is eliminated for ease of convenience.
By introducing universal scanners and improving discoverability in our apps, users gain back valuable time and the usability and flexibility of the app increases in the process. At Trafi, we strive to improve and develop our tech with these parameters in mind. It’s our goal to make MaaS so easy to use, it becomes the first choice of every urban mobility user of the future.
Intermodal trips look like a saving grace in getting people out of their cars. Aurelija Petrauskytė-Latakė — Trafi’s Lead Product Manager for Routing — dispels the complex nature of intermodality and explains why people find it challenging to rely upon it.
Imagine that you are having coffee with a friend near Potsdamer Platz in Berlin on a lovely Saturday morning. Your friend gets an idea to visit the Zoo, and you don’t hesitate to agree. Now, if you were Anna, a Berliner through-and-through, you would walk. It’s 46 minutes, a beautiful route, and she enjoys a pleasant stroll while catching up on her podcasts. However, if you were Peter, an ex-pat, you would prefer convenience while being very price sensitive. In other words, you would take a bus. Would getting caught in the rain change anything? Anna most likely would immediately jump into a shared car and go back home. For Peter, however, nothing would change: it’s price over comfort pretty much always, and it’s charming when it rains.
These are typical mobility deliberations we all make every single day. What we are considering — taking a bus, car, or walking — are routes from point A to point B. Every route has an origin, a destination, a mobility mode, a path, and a cost. Anna doesn’t mind the physical cost of walking because she finds standing on a platform or inside a train annoying. Peter, however, is willing to pay for the convenience of public transport above the physical toll of walking. You, however, would likely have a different attitude. We all are different people with distinct preferences in disparate situations.
The takeaway: no route is absolutely right for everyone. Every option we take is a tradeoff against the existing alternatives.
Say that Anna, Peter, and you are relying on the same trip planner to find your mobility options. Well, then the routing software that powers any trip planner would have to know, accept, and adhere to your differences and return a set of mobility options that would make sense specifically to you and your situation. Honestly, every trip planner faces a challenge to achieve that.
There is a solution, though: every one of us, including Anna, Peter and you, consider wait time, trip price, duration, distance, etc. What makes us all different are the distinct values we assign to shared preferences: Anna is more tolerant of walking, and Peter is more tolerant of public transport. I, for example, maybe am more tolerant of paying for ride-hailing. Keep in mind that these tolerance levels also are sensitive to context: whether it’s raining or if it’s rush hour, whether you’re carrying grocery bags or just running late — we all tend to reconsider our usual choices if the situation changes. Routing software would have to start exactly here: by embedding this shared set of preferences and assigning tolerance levels specific to people, cities, and even context.
In other words, trip planners have to consider our shared preferences and return a list of routes that make sense to our tolerance levels in any given situation.
Anna and Peter’s options look like a walk in the park in comparison with intermodal routes, e.g., combining a shared mobility option with a public transport one. Imagine that for that trip to Berlin’s Zoo; you decide to take the intermodal route recommended by your trip planner: a TIER kick scooter with a transfer to U-Bahn №2.
What follows is the actual sequence of actions you would be required to perform in an intermodal trip. First, your find a scooter, walk to the scooter, unlock the scooter, put on a helmet, ride the scooter from Potsdamer Platz to Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Park station for 5 minutes, confirm that you can lock the scooter, take off the helmet, lock the scooter, enter the station and find the platform, wait 6 minutes, transfer to U-Bahn №2, ride five stops for ten more minutes, and complete your last mile on foot.
That’s 23 minutes and around 5 euros. Slower than car-sharing or even a bus but, probably, more convenient than walking. But for this trip to even be recommended, a trip planner has to perform some severe behind-the-scenes calculations:
1. Evaluate the amount of effort you are willing to invest in this route, i.e., tolerance limit to walking, tolerance limit to driving yourself, tolerance to switch from a self-driven mode to a mode where you are driven, tolerance to wait for a transfer, etc.
2. Evaluate mobility service availability, i.e., inquire all integrated shared and public mobility providers in real-time about their available supply, so that you would be able to unlock a kick scooter to start the trip, and a transfer to U-Bahn at your connection point without the necessity to wait for a long time,
3. Predict upfront, i.e., combining the availability and your tolerance levels, calculate how far into the future this trip can be guaranteed, as the scooter supply changes constantly, they cannot be reserved indefinitely. At the same time, U-Bahn №2 does run on a schedule, but it does get disrupted sometimes, and you still have to make your connection at a specific time.
In other words, a trip planner has to recommend intermodal routes that make sense: provide options that show a tradeoff between price, the effort needed, and time saved. But even then, one person will find paying 5 euros for a 23-minute trip outrageous while another would be less concerned about price. Moreover, people are also less likely to consider taking intermodal routes where they are not guaranteed supply at transfer stations.
One of the points that tend to get lost in the whole debate about the future of urban mobility is the cognitive complexity of intermodal routes. As we’ve discussed before, people calculate tradeoffs. Risks of not finding a kick scooter, riding on unknown streets amid the car traffic, the possibility of missing your U-Bahn connection — it all adds up to an apparent reason why Anna and Peter will mostly prefer sticking to their regularly scheduled options in the upcoming future.
Nevertheless, for most people, sticking only to scarce public transport or private cars is not an answer either. We must increase the connectivity of the whole urban mobility network. Intermodal trips seem to be a legitimate way to get there. One immediate example is urban park & ride systems that allow commuters to leave their cars and switch to public transport or micro-mobility.
To put a finer point here: intermodal routes are already being suggested. In Berlin, Jelbi — a city-led MaaS platform — recommends taking at least one shared mobility combination with public transport in every tenth route search request. However, guaranteeing intermodality is still very complex: these routes have to deal with far more variables than distinctly public transport or shared mobility ones.
One can only hope that intermodal variability can be handled by an abundance of micro-mobility supply soon. Until then, it’s only natural that for regular people, intermodality is rarely the preferred option.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
It should be obvious that a true Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) solution is much more than just a mobility application for consumers. MaaS rises as a response to the current state of urban mobility, it is and has to be organized around public transport, and requires to assign the role of network orchestration to a public transport authority (PTA). In other words, PTA moves away from Public Transport and becomes the urban Mobility Authority.
PTA will have three responsibilities:
We believe that MaaS will start showing its real impact — private car rides will be replaced with sustainable and active mobility options — if its fundamental requirements and the reinvented role of the PTA will be adopted by the whole industry:
All of this suggests that the next item on the MaaS roadmap is the discovery of a new legal framework that would allow standardizing all of these business requirements and technical implementation. Especially, so that every MSP would not have to over-customize their services to each city. This, in turn, would allow us to move towards a situation where any mobility option could be opened with the same master key.
Next, we get back to the crux of it all — urban residents who just want to move in their cities as seamlessly and effortlessly as possible. Today, this creates mass inefficiencies, as everyone is looking for a convenient option that suits them the best. This is only amplified with products that are user-centric and don’t take into account the needs of the whole network.
For MaaS to work, we need to focus on how to help city residents adopt MaaS applications:
Currently, most of PTA or public transport operator (PTO) owned applications are designed only for a single mode, primarily fixed transport. We as city residents benefit from mostly exclusive offerings. So, cities have their mobility products, but their product design is not ready to support the multiplicity of mobility modes and providers that MaaS promises to deliver:
There already are off-the-shelf ready products that can support public authorities in launching these MaaS solutions in cities as fast as possible. More than that, these solutions are being constantly tested and continuously improved in different geographies with different use cases. Choosing a battle-tested product guarantees quicker user adoption and less maintenance than a custom solution.
The real challenge here, and the next item on the roadmap, is educating residents to switch over to MaaS rather than to stick to unimodal private mobility. What should follow, then, are measures that significantly affect car-based travel negatively, and an extensive campaign spreading the message that moving with sustainable, affordable, and safe means is more sensible and cool than sticking to current private options.
Finally, if we have the buy-in from the mobility industry, and if city residents are already adopting MaaS, then we can have a complete picture of how the urban population moves. Not just for the sake of enjoying data visualizations, rather than to achieve something counterintuitive: how to make sure that people would be able to rely on mobility less and less, and can reach their destinations in a hyper-proximate walking distance.
With a non-pervasive and holistic understanding of where people travel and why, city authorities would finally have all the tools to design cities in such a way that public services would be accessed either from home or nearby, and businesses would be incentivized to spread out evenly in all urban areas, not just in high density and high access urban centers. Thus, we as urban residents would gain access to where we need to go without even ever needing a car.
It’s a wonderful picture. But it can start only by us all agreeing on the actual problems and choosing the right solutions.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
If we follow Mobility as a Service fundamentals, it becomes self-evident that MaaS cannot be reduced to just one provider or just one app:
Once you integrate the complete mobility supply into a single application, you are confronted with a significant usability challenge — how to present the supply in a comprehensive and comprehensible way? A true MaaS solution must remove friction in how people travel around the city and allow them to easily book & pay for the services in one environment with a single master account. This is where a significant distinction between user-centric and citizen-centric design immediately arises:
In short, any MaaS application has to be a daily travel assistant that takes the very best from user-centricity and bases itself on what addresses actual city challenges. At the end of the day, any MaaS application has to (a) become a reliable alternative to a personal car, and (b) promote more sustainable mobility.
It is important to remember that cities are already orchestrating their mobility networks by:
As recent research by the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure suggests, to be actually sustainable, mobility providers need to link up their supply to supplement public transport rather than to compete with it. Thus, cities must take the reins they already have and start regulating, monitoring, and enforcing expected movement patterns in real-time with a dedicated policy management application that:
MaaS policy management, then, acts in tandem with any MaaS application: the latter taking the role of a receptacle for understanding how to move in a complex mobility network, while the former functioning as a delivery device to inform and nudge for the desired behavior.
Simply put, if we are focusing on car owners from underserved areas, they would be able to make a reasonable decision to leave their car in a park & ride lot and switch to public transport if a) they will know that they can do it, b) can do it seamlessly, and c) understand how much more convenient and cheaper it would be.
This might sound like a trivial and sound business practice, but each mobility provider has to be able to understand how to optimize their supply. Today, however, every provider is pursuing optimization by taking into account primarily only their fleets. Naturally, this leads to mass inefficiencies — overloaded and competing mobility supply in urban centers, while city outskirts lay mobility-bare.
In order to address inefficiencies in supply distribution, a systematically functioning MaaS requires an anonymized mobility data exchange for all mobility providers — only then can we expect providers to stop operating in twilight conditions, and cities start making evidence-driven policy-making decisions. It’s an idea that apparently is etched into the new European data strategy. This suggests that all mobility providers will have to accept standardized and secure integrations to plug into city-led MaaS solutions.
Given the sensitive nature of movement data collected from the whole mobility network, public transport authorities would have to retain strict control of who should access that data. This, in turn, means that every single mobility provider would need to pass quality thresholds and gain licenses to operate in cities. However, it should also suggest that taking a completely open, agnostic MaaS approach wouldn’t allow public transport authorities to have all the tools required to solve the challenges that their city has.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
In an ideal world, we should be able to teleport ourselves to our destinations. As that is still out of our reach for the foreseeable future, we have to rely on the next best thing — transportation. It either brings us what we need or gets us to where we need to go. In this episode, we will stress our ideal scenario and measure other mobility options against it.
Public transport seems to bring obstacles to the convenience and comfort of us just appearing where we need to be: we need to wait for it, share it, sometimes transfer and walk to and from it. Hence, it is only natural that people striving for absolute convenience would rather rely on affordable demand responsive services. This, in turn should guarantee that one would be driven directly from their origin to destination. However, your destination doesn’t completely match the destinations of other people that you share your morning commute with, thus it would also require to significantly reduce the vehicle sizes. Just try to imagine this swarm of small pods riding around the city, carrying everyone where they actually need to go. As prominent public transport expert Jarrett Walker has been arguing for years now, “where will they all fit in the urban street? … And when they take over, what room will be left for wider sidewalks, bike lanes, pocket parks, or indeed anything but a vast river of vehicles?”
It should be quite clear to us all that, given the challenges we have discussed before, MaaS has to depend primarily on mass public transport. It is precisely because it requires us to walk and share our rides, that it ensures the most effective, affordable, and sustainable option a mobility network can offer. More so: every MaaS solution should, first, take into account the existing physical infrastructure of public transport, create its digital twin, and, finally, enable city residents to navigate all public transport options with ease and reliability. By providing real-time arrivals, departures, disruptions, and pricing MaaS has to allow people to combine their rides between stops into full trip experiences by themselves or with trip planners. In conclusion, MaaS must entail nearly perfect public transport data and ticketing — allowing residents to plan and execute their trips without any friction.
Imagine trying to leave a low access area in the city outskirts where running a typical bus line is just too expensive. The most reasonable alternative here would actually be a demand responsive shuttle service that should serve the underserved community needs and guarantee high connectivity, affordability, and equitable access. Similarly, in cases where public transport just would not make sense, additional mobility supply should act as a supplement to it, rather than competing with it. This is especially true with micro-mobility in high density and high access areas in city centers: launching public transport for short trips there would not generate enough traffic, thus electrical or classic bikes, kick scooters, and mopeds constitute the most logical option to get around.
Moreover, all of these mobility options must be able to communicate with each other and with the public transport system, i.e. exchange their positions, capacity, and occupancy, to allow network orchestrators to optimize the supply in real-time. This, together with public transport as a backbone, would guarantee that we always have a sufficient supply that allows us to book and ride any mobility option. However, to solve the aforementioned challenges, there is a significant missing component, one that would not allow such service to be agnostic to our transport choices.
To build a truly equitable and safe mobility network, we need an entity to orchestrate it: one that by nature would not have profit as its main incentive, but rather fair and affordable access to the whole mobility network as the main goal. This would entail:
On a positive note, such orchestrating entities already exist — they are primarily known as public transport authorities. They have already acquired and retained a huge customer base, have planning skills and operational power, and, most importantly, a mandate to provide transport services for everyone at as fair of a price (if any) as possible. MaaS would, however, require for their mandates to be expanded and for them to start handling the whole mobility spectrum rather than just their public transit network. Some have already done that successfully already: while private mobility companies or actors trying to launch MaaS are struggling to cooperate and integrate other mobility providers to ensure a holistic mobility experience to their customers, public transport authorities like Berlin’s BVG or Munich’s MVG are naturally attracting all mobility network companies to integrate in public MaaS solutions, thus bringing value to city residents as fast as possible.
To be perfectly blunt: If public transport authorities are the only entities who actually manage to attract and convince mobility providers to hyper-connect into the mobility network that is, first of all, based on public transport, then one could argue that neither private nor hybrid MaaS models can guarantee what MaaS strives to guarantee — to be a legitimate alternative to privately owned cars. In other words, true MaaS seems to be public MaaS.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
The car is still considered to be the most flexible option to get around seamlessly — it promises you empowerment to ride anywhere at any moment. But what if you try remembering the last time you were scouting for a parking spot? In those moments, car ownership can be compared to dragging around a rock shackled to your leg. This is precisely the reason why, in 2001, Bernd Meurer coined the notion of Mobility-as-a-Service, arguing that “ownership and use do not necessarily have to be one and the same”*.
Thus, even though this argument for flexibility is usually implicitly directed against public transport, as much as for owning a personal car (most recent example — Ford’s ad for their new SUV), we cannot forget that public transport carries a significant volume of people every single day. For this reason, we decided to spend a lot of time learning as much as we could from public transport authorities (PTAs). And it seems that PTAs have become more and more convinced that MaaS is the adequate alternative to owning a car, promising even more expansive flexibility: if you were to have a personal master key to any transport option in your pocket, why would you ever rely only on one specific vehicle? This is further supported by ever-accelerating public and private tenders looking for software companies to provide working MaaS solutions. This excitement is nonetheless tainted with three extremely pervasive issues:
Comparing solutions, without first going over and prioritizing the actual challenges these solutions ambition to solve, is a futile endeavor. The following elements constitute the key challenges that any MaaS solution is expected to address:
All of these challenges suggest that MaaS is much more than just another app in your already overloaded phone screen. If a city is really looking to provide a master key to access any transport option for their residents as a legitimately better alternative to owning a car, this key has to make urban mobility networks more sustainable, effective, equitable, connected, and safe. This also implies that the main challenges now lie in the urban centers, which does not mean that rural areas or intercity traveling is not important. On the contrary, these use cases have many more significant challenges that would require completely new solutions to supplement urban, intracity MaaS.
These issues and the current understanding of MaaS do not go hand in hand, which is why we think the definition of MaaS and its understanding should be broadened up and unpacked into a clear developmental roadmap.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
Imagine that instead of owning the key that unlocks your own personal vehicle, you are handed a personal key to any given vehicle. This is exactly where the promise of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) lies — a seamless access point to the complete mobility spectrum. The whole idea can be seen not only as a promising concept for the end-user but also as an alternative to the private car that cities want to push out. As attractive as it may seem, the concept of MaaS also carries a lot of misconceptions. In a series of articles, we aim to dispel this fog with what we call the ‘MaaS Fundamentals’ that are the key to actually unjamming urban mobility.
A couple of years ago, a joint research group of ten civil engineering, economics, and environmental experts, stretching from the University of East Anglia to the University of Sydney, published a sweeping paper analyzing the carbon footprint of the United Kingdom cities.* Their analysis, regardless of its short length, is impactful enough to startle even the most inattentive readers: one of the report’s main findings was that London City alone accounted for 15.5 tons of CO2 emissions every year. Another startling observation showed that Londoners from the adjacent borough of Newham produced on average 34% less CO2 emissions in the same exact period. It is true that Newham is primarily a residential borough while London City is predominantly a commercial one, but this disparity in emission levels suggests that the bigger the salary, the likelier a Londoner is to travel by car.
Now, what would happen if people decided to give up their cars and rely exclusively on on-demand services? The answer can be found in a fascinating report made in Chicago. Last October, Mayor Lori Lightfoot published a long-awaited and publicly available analysis regarding ride-hailing companies operating in Chicago’s downtown area. It starts with a seemingly benign insight: in the four-year window between 2015 and 2018, Chicagoans increased their reliance on ride-hailing companies almost three-fold, which is music to the ears of those fighting for lower car ownership numbers. However, this outcome has come at a high cost:
In short, people with lower income tend to move in much more sustainable ways. On the other hand, affluent people tend to ride alone and significantly decrease connectivity for everyone else. This fits perfectly with multi-billionaire Elon Musk’s vision: in the near future, affluent people will rely on individualized transport (hyperloops, Tesla cars, or even rockets) rather than on anything public and shared.
Finally, all the aforementioned issues have led to a situation where even taking a stroll and simultaneously breathing has somehow become a lethal activity. Researchers at King’s College London are suggesting that particles coming from car brakes are just as harmful as fumes coming from exhaust pipes, affecting our immune system. One could argue that regenerative braking, a default feature in electric cars now, should help tackle both dust and CO2 emissions. But should we expect every single car owner in the world to line up and lease a new electric car this year?
Every single reader of this article, no matter their socioeconomic status, should easily name the last time they were lectured that car is not the problem and that the problem is rather how we utilize the car or its design. On top of that, we seem to lack imagination when it comes to envisioning a future without cars:
Who wouldn’t want to live in the heart of London or Chicago, and not be forced to share their rides? Either by taking a personal car or, better yet, by hailing an affordable personal driver. What everyone should agree on is that having easily accessible transport is necessary, but that owning your own car is not. So, let’s finally say it together out loud: car-centricity is the problem.
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
Mobility is evolving more rapidly than ever before. Berlin alone can now boast an impressive 30 shared mobility options. Just to name a few: kicks-scooters (Tier, Voi, Jump by Uber, Lime), mopeds (Emmy), shared bikes (Jump by Uber, Deezer, Mobike), car-sharing (Miles, WeShare) and many more.
However, public transport is still the only mobility option that can move a tremendous amount of people in one go. Therefore, it has always been and will remain (for the foreseeable future) the backbone of urban mobility. The strong wave of digitization and the availability of new mobility options in combination with changing consumption habits will lead the mobility industry to step into an era of Mobility as a Service.
This December, Trafi recorded a joint webinar with BVG, the main public transit agency in Berlin, to talk about Jelbi, the Mobility as a Service (or MaaS) solution that we launched together in the German capital. Speakers Sebastian Wolf, Product Owner for Mobility Apps at BVG, and Christof Schminke, Managing Director Commercial at Trafi, covered all the burning questions around the hot topic of MaaS. They covered themes ranging from what MaaS actually is, to creating a collaborative relationship between a public institution and a mobility tech startup.
In case you missed the webinar, here are the main takeaways:
Stay tuned for the next one!
Founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, Trafi has been revolutionizing urban mobility since 2013. Our MaaS platform is designed to run even the most complex transport systems and has been trusted by Berlin (BVG), Brussels (STIB), Portsmouth & Southampton (Solent Transport), Munich (MVG), and Zurich (SBB).
Trafi’s mission is to empower cities with state-of-the-art MaaS solution that helps to tackle their mobility challenges and to achieve ambitious sustainability objectives. Our white-label product offers all the features and components needed to launch your own-branded MaaS service. With more than 50 existing deep integrations to mobility service providers and payment facilitators, we help to reduce risk, cost, and time-to-launch for new services.
