Enhancing Sustainability in a Government-Contracted Mobility-as-a-Service Model

This discussion paper revises the government-contracted Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) model by Wong et al. (1), by making the contracting entity maintaining the mobility system’s sustainability, likely to enhance sustainability compared to the current state. The achievement of sustainability objectives is ensured by dynamic transport mode pricing based on the total sum of each trip’s internal and external costs. By combining government-contracting and sustainability objectives, MaaS can overcome the most critical regulatory and operational challenges in the implementation process, such as the lack of incentives for active mobility and cooperation between public and private companies. To implement such a system, we propose a four-step approach, with policy mechanisms changing from information-based to mainly regulatory and economic (2). The initial goal is a journey planning tool that transparently shows time, distance, emissions, and full costs of a trip for a chosen transport mode and recommends more sustainable alternatives. The full version offers mobility bundles and budget solutions including ticketing, combined with full cost transport pricing that takes into consideration space-time dynamics. However, the proposed approach cannot overcome all the risks involved in a MaaS implementation. Individual user behavior is difficult to predict and part in the evaluation of this concept. The goal of this proposed MaaS model is to improve environmental and social sustainability by changing transport prices in relation to the full costs. This paper contributes to the recently started nine-year MCube mobility research cluster project, which aims to develop and test a MaaS model for the metropolitan region of Munich.     «

This discussion paper revises the government-contracted Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) model by Wong et al. (1), by making the contracting entity maintaining the mobility system’s sustainability, likely to enhance sustainability compared to the current state. The achievement of sustainability objectives is ensured by dynamic transport mode pricing based on the total sum of each trip’s internal and external costs. By combining government-contracting and sustainability objectives, MaaS can overcome...     »