Ticket to Ride

There are at least two ways of looking at changing transportation: what’s shrinking and what’s emerging. These are always the two sides of disruption. Car manufacturers face a diminishing market as people opt not to own a car. Local bus companies that have enjoyed monopoly returns for years see their customers moving to bigger cities and closer to rail services. Traditional taxis are fighting for clients with the ride-sharing companies. At the same time, the ride-sharing companies, the eScooter services and the MaaS operators are growing, soon to be joined by autonomous taxis and maybe even passenger drones.

When we talk about Mobility as a Service (MaaS) we usually talk about MaaS operators. You can think of MaaS as a pyramid, with the modern operator represented by an app on the top, and traditional operators that offer physical transportation services at the bottom.This approach immediately offers two ways to look at and build MaaS: top down and ground up. Top down MaaS starts with an application, designed to be as beautiful and easy to use as possible, and then connects different modes of transport to it. A big part of the idea is of course that you can use the same app in as many places as possible. When this works it is convenient for the user, and the big dream is to have the world’s transportation behind one application. In practice the heterogeneity of cities and their transportation systems makes this extremely difficult.

Whenever a new technology is introduced, there are two main questions hanging in the air: does it work and what is it good for? The first question is best answered by trying the thing yourself and, if there is interest, studying the architecture behind it. The second question refers to money or time saved, quality improved or some other measurable improvement to the current state.
Decision-making on new technology should therefore be relatively rational, but it seldom is.

We still call the supercomputers in our pockets phones, although that is not how we use them much. Modern ticketing is a little bit like that. We can call it ticketing, but it is growing into something entirely different than a receipt for a single travel fare.

In smart mobility we are seeing a trend that is challenging this and that may be a game changer. It is pay-as-you-go, but with a twist in the end.