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Delivering mobility as a service (MaaS) through a broker/aggregator business model

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Abstract

Mobility as a service (MaaS) promises a bold new future where bundled public transport and shared mobility options (carsharing, ridesharing, bikesharing and microtransit) will provide consumers with seamless mobility on par with and exceeding that of private vehicle ownership. Whilst there is a growing body of work examining the market and end user demand for MaaS, there remains a limited understanding of the supply-side around new business models for delivering these integrated mobility services. Mobility broker/aggregator models have been proposed, but to date there exists no quantitative evidence to empirically test the conditions around which interested businesses might invest or supply in this new entrepreneurial model. In this paper, the idea of mode-agnostic mobility contracts [first proposed in Wong et al. (in: 40th Australasian Transport Research Forum (ATRF), Darwin, 2018)] are tested as the interface for bringing together specialised businesses as part of a future transport ecosystem. Data is collected from 202 organisations across 28 countries and mixed logit models estimated to identify the importance of contract attributes like modal mix, role of government, return on investment expectations, branding and equity contribution on respondent interest to partake in a MaaS business. Willingness-to-pay estimates are then devised to identify the potential value proposition of a mobility broker/aggregator to the business community.

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Notes

  1. See http://ubigo.se (and involved in many European projects).

  2. See https://whimapp.com (operated by MaaS Global and based on the SkedGo platform).

  3. See https://zipster.io (operated by MobilityX, an SMRT start-up).

  4. Held as part of the 15th International Conference on Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger Transport (Thredbo 15) in Stockholm, Sweden.

  5. See http://www.choice-metrics.com.

  6. Organisation size was determined by the number of employees: small enterprises have ≤ 999 employees; medium enterprises have 1000–9999 employees; and large enterprises have ≥ 10,000 employees.

  7. Including Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People's Republic of China.

  8. The importance of public transport also corresponds to demand-side studies like Ho et al. (2018) and Matyas (2020) which show that end users also value public transport entitlements as a critical component of their MaaS product.

  9. See http://www.limdep.com/products/nlogit.

  10. See https://imovecrc.com/project/maas-trial-sydney.

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Acknowledgements

This paper contributes to the research program of the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations Bus Rapid Transit (BRT+) Centre of Excellence. We acknowledge the Foundation for funding support. Edward Wei (ITLS) programmed our survey instrument. We thank the many experts and business leaders around the world who agreed to be interviewed and assisted in outreach, without which this study would not have been possible.

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  1. Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies (ITLS), University of Sydney Business School, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Yale Z. Wong & David A. Hensher

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  1. Yale Z. Wong
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  2. David A. Hensher
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by YW under guidance from DH. The first draft of the manuscript was written by YW and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yale Z. Wong.

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Appendix

Appendix

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Fig. 4
figure 4

Explanation of attributes offered to respondents as part of the choice task introduction in the survey instrument, for a hypothetical medium-sized mode-specific operator Metro

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Wong, Y.Z., Hensher, D.A. Delivering mobility as a service (MaaS) through a broker/aggregator business model. Transportation 48, 1837–1863 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-020-10113-z

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