Open MaaS for Public Transit
A frequent question in the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) space is what is the best role for a local public transit agency (PTA) or regional transit agency (RTA)? Some agencies want to build, own and operate their own private MaaS platform. Some want to own and operate their own private platform but outsource the development of a closed model like MaaS Madrid.
At least at Iomob we believe proprietary, closed MaaS platforms operated by a City or the PTA/RTA are not desirable. It takes significant taxpayer money to build or develop proprietary platforms and it is not likely that public entities will be able to innovate and provide the user experience that private MaaS players (either B2B2C or B2B/B2G) can achieve.
Our friends at MaaS Global (AKA Whim) have been vocal about the challenges of getting local transit operators to open their data and ticketing platforms so that public transit can be packaged in with other private mobility services to offer their pay as you go and subscription services. There has been a surprising amount of resistance to allowing third party MaaS players to sell public transit tickets on their platforms. I say surprising, because for me at least, public transit authorities should be encouraging the resolution of first and last mile to public transit services as this can help get people out of private cars, supporting the desired transition towards lower congestion, lower emitting cities. One would hope, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the devastating impact it is having on the transit agencies, that this may further accelerate the desire to find anyway to get more people to use transit and to not revert to the perceived safety of their cars!
Most of those debating the role of PTAs/RTAs in MaaS take a fairly binary approach: either the transit authority should own and operate a private, closed MaaS, or the PTA should open their ticketing and allow a market approach with multiple competing MaaS players battling it out for user acquisition.
What if there is a middle ground between the two extremes? At Iomob we have been exploring this middle ground for a few years now and finally found a public sector client with shared values and curiosity to test this middle ground. Skane Trafiken, along with their partner Skane Innovation and with funding from the Swedish Energy Association, are enabling Iomob to build a middleware solution for the region that includes Malmo, Lund and Helsingborg.
Iomob will offer our SDK that combines intermodal algorithms, their own new BOB transit ticketing system and integrations of several private mobility services (taxis, ridehailing, micromobility) for use within Skane Trafiken’s own transit app. This will also likely incorporate our new features for social distancing and potentially virtual seat as well.
But what is really unique about this project is that they have given the green light for Iomob to offer the same SDK (or the API that feeds it) to other organizations wishing to offer a MaaS experience in the region. Therefore Skane Trafiken is moving away from the paradigm of transit agency controlled monopoly by being one of potentially many players offering MaaS in their region with the ability to include the sale of Skane Trafiken services in these third party apps.
We believe this is the first known implementation of a hybrid model where a PTA/RTA pays a private MaaS developer to create an SDK for use inside the RTAs app but also encouraging the developer to recruit third party MaaS players to also use the SDK to offer competing MaaS experiences in their region. Iomob has already initiated conversations with three private MaaS players to explore their use of Iomob’s SDK (or the API that precedes it) in the Skane region. In the future we believe we will see all kinds of innovations from competing MaaS services. Some will focus on subscription models. Some will focus on roaming models in regions or even across the globe, others may choose to add all kinds of new ancillary services ontop of mobility (e.g. hotels, tourist attractions, discounts at restaurants, etc). In fact here are six different revenue models for MaaS we have explored with clients in recent months, demonstrating there could be room for multiple competing MaaS platforms in the same region, each with their own motivations and revenue models.
We also hope to work with Skane Trafiken and Skane Innovation to create a software tool that supports dynamic ecosystem management functions for Skane Trafiiken so that any third party MaaS app who wants to access the SDK that contains their transit ticketing, must adhere to the static and dynamic rules set by Skane Trafiken in their platform. This could include, for example, methods for regulating the parking of shared and micromobility or demand management tools such as varying the number of private ridehailing and licensed taxis vehicles that can circulate in response to a crisis (e.g. weather event, loss of electricity, terrorism) or even to subsidize private operators to service the public when the transit system is too congested or when service delivery is not financially viable (sending a bus along a fixed route with one known user).
It is hard to claim that there is a one size fits all solution to the role of PTAs/RTAs in MaaS ecosystems on a global basis or even within a region like Europe or a country. Yet, we believe our pioneering client, Skane Trafiken has the right mindset to be open to experimenting with a hybrid model where they have a MaaS solution but they open up that solution so that third parties can also come into their region and offer MaaS platforms. The potential to compel these platforms to adhere to static and dynamic regulatory controls makes the Skane Trafiken experiment even more innovative and hopefully one the whole global MaaS community will have their eyes on.
Iomob, which stands for the Internet of Mobility, headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, offers a complete Mobility as a Service solution which combines proprietary algorithms enabling multimodal combinations of public and private services and an SDK that allows end users to discover mobility services, receive multimodal combinations for their journeys, book and pay for a range of mobility services via our client’s own apps. Iomob has won numerous open innovation challenge awards from organisations like Ford Motors, Renfe and Sweden’s Sustainable Mobility Challenge. Iomob has also participated in prestigious startup accelerators such as Techstars and Wayra and has won several awards from Newsweek, TravelTechEurope, South Summit, ERTICO (ITS Europe) and the Federation of International Automobiles (FiA).
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